Trailerpark (23 page)

“Hunnert an' fifty, maybe,” Emerson said.

“Hunnert an' fifty! Wow!” Al said, and he took another swallow from his glass. “Goes down like mother's milk!” He laughed with a wide-open mouth.

The others laughed with him and drank. At the suggestion of the boy's father, Emerson cut two thick slices of bread and made a cheese sandwich for the boy, then brought out a large jar of pickled pig's knuckles for the men at the table, and while the boy ate his sandwich and the men gnawed away at the knuckles and talked politics, the old man busied himself at the sink washing glasses and a few greasy plates. He asked the boy to go out in the shed by the barn and bring in an armload of stove wood and told the boy's father that the cheese sandwich was free. Quickly, the boy pulled on his coat and hat and went out.

When a few minutes later he returned with the wood, the men's voices were loud, and Al was shouting at Emerson, “You was crazy, man! It don't matter he was a Roman Catholic, he was gonna make it so we could sit in town and buy a damned drink of whiskey when we want!”

“Mattered to
me
he was Catholic,” Jimmy said in a loud, sullen voice. “You want the Pope runnin' the country? You want all them New York and Boston Irishers and Eye-talians takin' over everything we fought the damned war for? That what you want?” he shouted at Al. “Fish-eaters!” he sneered.

Emerson said to Al, “I never vote for a man who's gonna put me outa business. That's
my
politics. Period.”

“Al Smith wouldn't put you outa business,” Fred Knox said. “Matter a fact, if it ever gets to be legal to drink, they's a hell of a lot of people will turn out to be drinkers. You'd be sellin' more of this stuff than you can make by now if Smith had won,” he pronounced.

“The hell you say.”

“The hell I do say. Smith wouldn'a put you outa business. But tell me this, Emerson, if Hoover was the Democrat an' Smith the Republican, instead of the other way around, which one would you have voted for then?” Fred lifted his glass woozily and snickered into it.

The other men looked steadily over at Emerson, and even the boy looked at him.

“What's it matter anyhow. People oughtn't to talk politics and religion when they're drinking,” Emerson said, and he went back to wiping off the glasses in the sink.

“Religion an' politics is gettin' to be the same thing, you ask me,” Jimmy said grumpily.

Fred signaled for more drinks, and Emerson refilled the glasses. For a while longer the men drifted in and out of several conversations concerning the subject of religion-and-politics, and then Al reached out and laid a long paw on Fred's wrist.

“
You
can do it!” he exclaimed, his face brightening.

“Do what?”

“You can take Jimmy here. Arm-wrestling. I tol' him this morning that they's all kinda farmers around town could beat his butt.
You
can do it!”

“He does it all the time,” Fred said. “I don't know the tricks.”

“There ain't any tricks,” Jimmy said. He had sat up straight in his chair and was already poised, ready, his gaze fixed steadily on the boy's father.

“I don't know,” Fred said.

“Sure you can. I got a dollar bill here says you can. You willin' to bet, Jimmy?”

“Sure.” The bearded man reached into his pocket and drew out a wrinkled bill and tossed it casually onto the table.

“It ain't my money,” Fred said, and he rolled up his right sleeve and hitched his chair closer to the table.

Jimmy squared off against him, and the men locked hands. The boy stood up, and he and Emerson came toward the pair and stood at the end of the table, facing them.

“All right,” Al said, grinning broadly.

“Fine, fine. Call it,” Fred said, his face taut and somber.

Jimmy was relaxed, his beefy shoulders loose, his left hand lying flat in his lap. He watched the other man's eyes.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

“Okay … wrestle!”

Fred strained, the veins and cords in his neck leaping forward as if he were lifting a great weight, but the other man's arm did not move. He tried to twist the man's wrist toward him, so he could pull his arm instead of push it, but the man's arm was like stone and would not be twisted or pulled. Then slowly, steadily, the man with the beard pushed Fred's hand back, inch by inch, in a slow, precise arc, all the way to the table. He let go of Fred's hand, smiled through his beard and extended his right hand, palm up, to Al. “You owe me.”

Al shook his head and dug out a dollar bill. “I thought sure you could take him, Fred. You gotta lotta size on you.”

“I guess it's in the wrong places,” he said. “And I told you, I don't know the tricks.” He stood up, wobbled a bit, and reached for his wallet. He handed two dollars over to Emerson, nodded toward his son, who put his hat and coat on, and headed toward the door.

As the boy passed his father's empty chair, he removed the man's mackinaw from the chairback and carried it out with him. “Here, Pa, you forgot your coat,” he said in the hallway, but his father was already beyond the hallway and outside.

 

The man and the boy rode home in silence, until they reached the driveway, where the man instructed his son to swing the car around so it could be backed into the barn. “I won't be going out again today,” he explained. His voice was low and his words came slowly and thickly as if he were speaking through a cloth curtain.

The boy turned the car around at the road and proceeded to back into the driveway skillfully and without hesitation, as if he had been driving to town for years. At the barn, he stopped, drew the brake up and stepped down from the car to open the barn door. His father sat heavily in his seat, ignoring him, lost in thought or lost in feeling. When the boy returned to the car, the father turned to him and said, “You tell your mother we ate in town. You understand?”

The boy didn't look at him. He peered out the windshield across the square hood to the crisply shoveled driveway, along the path to the porch and house. There was a right way to do everything, even something as simple and unimportant as shoveling a path through snow to the kitchen. The boy's father believed that, he had said it, too, and now the boy believed it. The pleasure you got from looking at a job done the right way proved that there was such a thing as the right way. Not just the best way, not the easiest way, not even the logical way. You did things in life the right way, and then, afterward, you got to admire what you had done. You didn't have to avert your eyes from what you had done.

“You understand me, boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, then,” he said, and he got out of the car. He held the door open for a second, looking at the ground as if trying to remember something, then said to the boy, “Leave the trap out here in the barn, but bring the rest of the stuff inside to the shop. You set the trap tonight after supper. New snow'll make a fox foolish and hungry at the same time.” Then he moved away, clumsily, wobbling slightly, with the door left wide open behind him.

The boy reached across his father's seat and drew the door closed. He let the brake off and backed the car into the darkness of the barn.

W
HEN YOUR CHILD SHOWS
the first signs of illness—fever, lassitude, aching joints and muscles—you fear that he or she is dying. You may not admit it to anyone, but the sight of your child lying flushed and feverish in bed becomes for an instant the sight of your child in its coffin. The nature of reality shifts, and it's suddenly not clear to you whether you are beginning to dream or are waking from a dream, for you watch the child's breath stutter and stop, and you cry out and then struggle in vain to blow life back into the tiny, inert body lying below you. Or you see the child heave himself into convulsions, thrash wildly in the bed and utter hoarse, incoherent noises, as if he were possessed by a demon, and horrified, helpless, you back to the door, hands to mouth, crying, “Stop, stop, please, oh God, please stop!” Or, suddenly, the bed is sopped with blood pouring from the child's body, blood seeping into the mattress, over the sheets, through the child's tangled pajamas, and the child whitens, stares up pitifully and without understanding, for there is no wound to blame, there is only this blood emptying out of his body, and you cannot staunch its flow but must stand there and watch your child's miraculous, mysterious life disappear before you. For that is the key that unlocks these awful visions—your child's being simply alive is both miracle and mystery, and therefore it seems both natural and understandable that he should be dead.

 

Marcelle called her boys from the kitchen to hurry and get dressed for school. One of these mornings she was not going to keep after them like this and they would all be late for school and she would not write a note to the teacher to explain anything, she didn't give a damn if the teacher kept them after school, because it would teach them a lesson once and for all, and that lesson was when she woke them in the morning they had to hurry and get dressed and make their beds and get the hell out here to the kitchen and eat their breakfasts and brush their teeth and get the hell out the door to school so she could get dressed and eat her breakfast and go to work. There were four of them, the four sons of Marcelle and Richard Chagnon. Joel was the oldest at twelve, and then, separated by little more than nine months, came Raymond, Maurice and Charles. The father had moved out, had been thrown out of the apartment by Marcelle's younger brother Steve and one of Steve's friends nearly nine years ago, when the youngest, Charles, was still an infant, and though for several years Richard had tried to convince Marcelle she should let him move back in with them and let him be her husband and the father of his four sons again, she had never allowed it, for his way of being a husband and father was to get drunk and beat her and the older boys and then to wake ashamed and beg their forgiveness. For years she had forgiven him, because to her when you forgive someone you make it possible for that person to change, and the boys also forgave him—they were, after all, her sons too, and she had taught them, in their dealings with each other, to forgive. If you don't forgive someone who has hurt you, he can't change into a new person. He is stuck in his life with you at the point where he hurt you. But her husband and their father Richard, after five years of it, had come to seem incapable of using their forgiveness in any way that allowed him to stop hurting them, so finally one night she had sent her oldest boy, Joel, who was then only four and a half years old, out the door and down the dark stairs to the street, down the street to the tenement where her brother Steve lived with his girlfriend, and Joel had found Steve sitting at the kitchen table drinking beer with a friend and had said to him, “Come and keep my daddy from hitting my mommy!” That night for Marcelle marked the end of the period of forgiveness, for she had permitted outsiders, her brother and his friend, to see how badly her husband Richard behaved. By that act she had ceased to protect her husband, and you cannot forgive someone you will not protect. Richard never perceived or understood that shift, just as all those years he had never perceived or understood what it meant to be protected and forgiven. If you don't know what you've got when you've got it, you won't know what you've lost when you've lost it. Marcelle was Catholic and even though she was not a diligent Catholic she was a loyal one, and she never remarried, which is not to say that over the years she did not now and again fall in love, once even with a married man, only briefly, however, until she became strong enough to reveal her affair to Father Brautigan, after which she had broken off with the man, to the relief of her sons, for they had not liked the way he had come sneaking around at odd hours to see their mother and talk with her in hushed tones in the kitchen until very late, when the lights would go off and an hour or two later he would leave. When in the morning the children got up and came out to the kitchen for breakfast, they would talk in low voices, as if the married man were still in the apartment and asleep in their mother's bed, and she would have deep circles under her eyes and would stir her coffee slowly and look out the window and now and then quietly remind them to hurry or they'd be late for school. They were more comfortable when she was hollering at them, standing at the door to their bedroom, her hands on her hips, her dressing gown flapping open as she whirled and stomped back to the kitchen, embarrassing her slightly, for beneath her dressing gown she wore men's long underwear, so that, by the time they got out to the kitchen themselves, her dressing gown would have been pulled back tightly around her and tied at the waist, and all they could see of the long underwear beneath it would be the top button at her throat, which she would try to cover casually with one hand while she set their breakfasts before them with the other. On this morning, however, only three of her sons appeared at the table, dressed for school, slumping grumpily into their chairs, for it was a gray, wintry day in early December, barely light outside. The oldest, Joel, had not come out with them, and she lost her temper, slammed three plates of scrambled eggs and toast down in front of the others and fairly jogged back to the bedroom, stalked to the narrow bed by the wall where the boy slept and yanked the covers away, to expose the boy, curled up on his side, eyes wide open, his face flushed and sweating, his hands clasped together as if in prayer. Horrified, she looked down at the gangly boy, and she saw him dead and quickly lay the covers back over him, gently straightening the blanket and top sheet. Then, slowly, she sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked his hot forehead, brushing his limp blond hair back, feeling beneath his jawbone as if for a pulse, touching his cheeks with the smooth backside of her cool hand. “Tell me how you feel, honey,” she said to the boy. He didn't answer her. His tongue came out and touched his dry lips and went quickly back inside his mouth. “Don't worry, honey,” she said, and she got up from the bed. “It's probably the flu, that's all. I'll take your temperature and maybe call Doctor Wickshaw, and he'll tell me what to do. If you're too sick, I'll stay home from the tannery today. All right?” she asked and took a tentative step away from the bed. “Okay,” the boy said weakly. The room was dark and cluttered with clothing and toys, model airplanes and boats, weapons, costumes, tools, hockey equipment, portable radios, photographs of athletes and singers, like the prop room of a small theater group. As she left the room, Marcelle stopped in the doorway and looked back. The boy huddled in his bed looked like one of the props, a ventriloquist's dummy, perhaps, or a heap of clothes that, in this shadowy half-light, only resembled a human child for a second or two, and then, looked at from a second angle, came clearly to be no more than an impatiently discarded costume.

 

Most people, when they call in a physician, deal with him as they would a priest. They say that what they want is a medical opinion, a professional medical man's professional opinion, when what they really want is his blessing. Information is useful only insofar as it provides peace of mind, release from the horrifying visions of dead children, an end to this dream. Most physicians, like most priests, recognize the need and attempt to satisfy it. This story takes place almost twenty years ago, in the early 1960s, in a small mill town in central New Hampshire, and it was especially true then and there that the physician responded before all other needs to the patient's need for peace of mind, and only when that need had been met would he respond to the patient's need for bodily health. In addition, because he usually knew all the members of the family and frequently treated them for injuries and diseases, he tended to regard an injured or ill person as one part of an injured or ill family. Thus it gradually became the physician's practice to minimize the danger or seriousness of a particular injury or illness, so that a broken bone was often called a probable sprain, until x rays proved otherwise, and a concussion was called, with a laugh, a bump on the head, until the symptoms—dizziness, nausea, sleepiness—persisted, when the bump on the head became a possible mild concussion, which eventually may have to be upgraded all the way to fractured skull. It was the same with diseases. A virus, the flu that's going around, a low-grade intestinal infection, and so on, often came to be identified a week or two later as strep throat, bronchial pneumonia, dysentery, without necessarily stopping there. There was an obvious, if limited, use for this practice, because it soothed and calmed both the patient and the family members, which made it easier for the physician to make an accurate diagnosis and to secure the aid of the family members in providing treatment. It was worse than useless, however, when an overoptimistic diagnosis of a disease or injury led to the patient's sudden, crazed descent into sickness, pain, paralysis, and death.

 

Doctor Wickshaw, a man in his middle-forties, portly but in good physical condition, with horn-rimmed glasses and a Vandyke beard, told Marcelle that her son Joel probably had the flu, it was going around, half the school was out with it. “Keep him in bed a few days and give him lots of liquids,” he instructed her after examining the boy. He made housecalls, if the call for help came during morning hours or if it was truly an emergency. Afternoons he was at his office, and evenings he made rounds at the Concord Hospital, twenty-five miles away. Marcelle asked what she should do about the fever, one hundred four degrees, and he told her to give the boy three aspirins now and two more every three or four hours. She saw the man to the door, and as he passed her in the narrow hallway he placed one hand on her rump, and he said to the tall, broad-shouldered woman, “How are things with you, Marcelle? I saw you walking home from the tannery the other day, and I said to myself, ‘Now that's a woman who shouldn't be alone in the world.'” He smiled into her bladelike face, the face of a large, powerful bird, and showed her his excellent teeth. His hand was still pressed against her rump and they stood face to face, for she was as tall as he. She was not alone in the world, she reminded him, mentioning her four sons. The doctor's hand slipped to her thigh. She did not move. “But you get lonely,” he told her. She had gray eyes and her face was filled with fatigue, tiny lines that broke her smooth pale skin like the cracks in a ceramic jar that long ago had broken and had been glued back together again, as good as new, they say, and even stronger than before, but nevertheless fragile-looking now, and brittle perhaps, more likely to break a second time, it seemed, than when it had not been broken at all. “Yes,” she said, “I get lonely,” and with both hands, she reached up to her temples and pushed her dark hair back, and holding on to the sides of her own head she leaned it forward and kissed the man for several seconds, pushing at him with her mouth, until he pulled away, red-faced, his hand at his side now, and moved self-consciously sideways toward the door. “I'll come by tomorrow,” he said in a low voice. “To see how Joel's doing.” She smiled slightly and nodded. “If he's better,” she said, “I'll be at work. But the door is always open.” From the doorway, he asked if she came home for lunch. “Yes,” she said, “when one of the boys is home sick, I do. Otherwise, no.” He said that he might be here then, and she said, “Fine,” and reached forward and closed the door on him.

 

Sometimes you dream that you are walking across a meadow under sunshine and a cloudless blue sky, hand in hand with your favorite child, and soon you notice that the meadow is sloping uphill slightly, and so walking becomes somewhat more difficult, although it remains a pleasure, for you are with your favorite child and he is beautiful and happy and confident that you will let nothing terrible happen to him. You cross the crest, a rounded, meandering ridge, and start downhill, walking faster and more easily. The sun is shining and there are wildflowers all around you, and the grass is golden and drifting in long waves in the breeze. Soon you find that the hill is steeper than before, the slope is falling away beneath your feet, as if the earth were curving in on itself, so you dig in your heels and try to slow your descent. Your child looks up at you and there is fear in his eyes, as he realizes he is falling away from you. “My hand!” you cry. “Hold tightly to my hand!” And you grasp the child's hand, who has started to fly away from you, as if over the edge of a crevice, while you dig your heels deeper into the ground and grab with your free hand at the long grasses behind you. The child screams and looks back at you with a pitiful gaze, and suddenly he grows so heavy that his weight is pulling you free of the ground also. You feel your feet leave the ground, and your body falls forward and down, behind your child's body, even though with one hand you still cling to the grasses. You weep, and you let go of your child's hand. The child flies away and you wake up, shuddering.

 

That night the boy's fever went higher. To one hundred five degrees, and Marcelle moved the younger boys into her own room, so that she could sleep in the bed next to the sick boy's. She bathed him in cool water with washcloths, coaxed him into swallowing aspirin with orange juice, and sat there on the edge of the bed next to his and watched him sleep, although she knew he was not truly sleeping, he was merely lying there on his side, his legs out straight now, silent and breathing rapidly, like an injured dog, stunned and silently healing itself. But the boy was not healing himself, he was hourly growing worse. She could tell that. She tried to move him so that she could straighten the sheets, but when she touched him, he cried out in pain, as if his back or neck were broken, and frightened, she drew back from him. She wanted to call Doctor Wickshaw, and several times she got up and walked out to the kitchen where the telephone hung on the wall like a large black insect, and each time she stood for a few seconds before the instrument, remembered the doctor in the hallway and what she had let him promise her with his eyes, remembered then what he had told her about her son's illness, and turned and walked back to the boy and tried again to cool him with damp cloths. Her three other sons slept peacefully through the night and knew nothing of what happened until morning came.