Red Dragon

  Grandmother stirred, tensed, her back hardened against his cheek, voice hissing. “I’ve never sheen. . . .” A clatter on the bedside table as she found her teeth, clacket as she put them in. “I’ve never seen a child as disgusting and dirty as you. Get out, get out of this bed.”

  She turned on the bedside lamp. He stood on the carpet shivering. She wiped her thumb across his eyebrow. Her thumb came away bloody.

  “Did you break something?”

  He shook his head so fast droplets of blood fell on Grandmother’s nightgown.

  “Upstairs. Go on.”

  The dark came down over him as he climbed the stairs. He couldn’t turn on the lights because Grandmother had cut the cords off short so only she could reach them. He did not want to get back in the wet bed. He stood in the dark holding on to the footboard for a long time. He thought she wasn’t coming. The blackest corners in the room knew she wasn’t coming.

  She came, snatching the short cord on the ceiling light, her arms full of sheets. She did not speak to him as she changed the bed.

  She gripped his upper arm and pulled him down the hall to the bathroom. The light was over the mirror and she had to stand on tiptoe to reach it. She gave him a washcloth, wet and cold.

  “Take off your nightshirt and wipe yourself off.”

  Smell of adhesive tape and the bright sewing scissors clicking. She snipped out a butterfly of tape, stood him on the toilet lid and closed the cut over his eye.

  “Now,” she said. She held the sewing scissors under his round belly and he felt cold down there.

  “Look,” she said. She grabbed the back of his head and bent him over to see his little penis lying across the bottom blade of the open scissors. She closed the scissors until they began to pinch him.

  “Do you want me to cut it off?”

  He tried to look up at her, but she gripped his head. He sobbed and spit fell on his stomach.

  “Do you?”

  “No, Aayma. No, Aayma.”

  “I pledge you my word, if you ever make your bed dirty again I’ll cut it off. Do you understand?”

  “Yehn, Aayma.”

  “You can find the toilet in the dark and you can sit on it like a good boy. You don’t have to stand up. Now go back to bed.”

  At two A.M. the wind rose, gusting warm out of the southeast, clacking together the branches of the dead apple trees, rustling the leaves of the live ones. The wind drove warm rain against the side of the house where Francis Dolarhyde, forty-two years old, lay sleeping.

  He lay on his side sucking his thumb, his hair damp and flat on his forehead and his neck.

  Now he awakes. He listens to his breathing in the dark and the tiny clicks of his blinking eyes. His fingers smell faintly of gasoline. His bladder is full.

  He feels on the bedside table for the glass containing his teeth.

  Dolarhyde always puts in his teeth before he rises. Now he walks to the bathroom. He does not turn on the light. He finds the toilet in the dark and sits down on it like a good boy.

  27

  The change in Grandmother first became apparent in the winter of 1947, when Francis was eight.

  She stopped taking meals in her room with Francis. They moved to the common table in the dining room, where she presided over meals with the elderly residents.

  Grandmother had been trained as a girl to be a charming hostess, and now she unpacked and polished her silver bell and put it beside her plate.

  Keeping a luncheon table going, pacing the service, managing conversation, batting easy conversational lobs to the strong points of the shy ones, turning the best facets of the bright ones in the light of the other guests’ attention is a considerable skill and one now sadly in decline.

  Grandmother had been good at it in her time. Her efforts at this table did brighten meals initially for the two or three among the residents who were capable of linear conversation.

  Francis sat in the host’s chair at the other end of the avenue of nodding heads as Grandmother drew out the recollections of those who could remember. She expressed keen interest in Mrs. Floder’s honeymoon trip to Kansas City, went through the yellow fever with Mr. Eaton a number of times, and listened brightly to the random unintelligible sounds of the others.

  “Isn’t that interesting, Francis?” she said, and rang the bell for the next course. The food was a variety of vegetable and meat mushes, but she divided it into courses, greatly inconveniencing the kitchen help.

  Mishaps at the table were never mentioned. A ring of the bell and a gesture in mid-sentence took care of those who had spilled or gone to sleep or forgotten why they were at the table. Grandmother always kept as large a staff as she could pay.

  As Grandmother’s general health declined, she lost weight and was able to wear dresses that had long been packed away. Some of them were elegant. In the cast of her features and her hairstyle, she bore a marked resemblance to George Washington on the dollar bill.

  Her manners had slipped somewhat by spring. She ruled the table and permitted no interruptions as she told of her girlhood in St. Charles, even revealing personal matters to inspire and edify Francis and the others.

  It was true that Grandmother had enjoyed a season as a belle in 1907 and was invited to some of the better balls across the river in St. Louis.

  There was an “object lesson” in this for everyone, she said. She looked pointedly at Francis, who crossed his legs beneath the table.

  “I came up at a time when little could be done medically to overcome the little accidents of nature,” she said. “I had lovely skin and hair and I took full advantage of them. I overcame my teeth with force of personality and bright spirits—so successfully, in fact, that they became my ‘beauty spot.’ I think you might even call them my ‘charming trademark.’ I wouldn’t have traded them for the world.”

  She distrusted doctors, she explained at length, but when it became clear that gum problems would cost her her teeth, she sought out one of the most renowned dentists in the Midwest, Dr. Felix Bertl, a Swiss. Dr. Bertl’s “Swiss teeth” were very popular with a certain class of people, Grandmother said, and he had a remarkable practice.

  Opera singers fearing that new shapes in their mouths would affect their tone, actors and others in public life came from as far away as San Francisco to be fitted.

  Dr. Bertl could reproduce a patient’s natural teeth exactly and had experimented with various compounds and their effect on resonance.

  When Dr. Bertl had completed her dentures, her teeth appeared just as they had before. She overcame them with personality and lost none of her unique charm, she said with a spiky smile.

  If there was an object lesson in all this, Francis did not appreciate it until later; there would be no further surgery for him until he could pay for it himself.

  Francis could make it through dinner because there was something he looked forward to afterward.

  Queen Mother Bailey’s husband came for her each evening in the mule-drawn wagon he used to haul firewood. If Grandmother was occupied upstairs, Francis could ride with them down the lane to the main road.

  He waited all day for the evening ride: sitting on the wagon seat beside Queen Mother, her tall flat husband silent and almost invisible in the dark, the iron tires of the wagon loud in the gravel behind the jingle of the bits. Two mules, brown and sometimes muddy, their cropped manes standing up like brushes, swishing their tails across their rumps. The smell of sweat and boiled cotton cloth, snuff and warm harness. There was the smell of woodsmoke when Mr. Bailey had been clearing new ground and sometimes, when he took his shotgun to the new ground, a couple of rabbits or squirrels lay in the wagon box, stretched long as though they were running.

  They did not talk on the ride down the lane; Mr. Bailey spoke only to the mules. The wagon motion bumped the boy pleasantly against the Baileys. Dropped off at the end of the lane, he gave his nightly promise to walk straight back to the house and watched the lantern on the wagon move away. He could hear t
hem talking down the road. Sometimes Queen Mother made her husband laugh and she laughed with him. Standing in the dark, it was pleasant to hear them and know they were not laughing at him.

  Later he would change his mind about that. . . .

  Francis Dolarhyde’s occasional playmate was the daughter of a sharecropper who lived three fields away. Grandmother let her come to play because it amused her now and then to dress the child in the clothing Marian had worn when she was small.

  She was a red-haired listless child and she was too tired to play much of the time.

  One hot June afternoon, bored with fishing for doodlebugs in the chicken yard with straws, she asked to see Francis’s private parts.

  In a corner between the chicken house and a low hedge that shielded them from the lower windows of the house, he showed her. She reciprocated by showing him her own, standing with her pilled cotton underwear around her ankles. As he squatted on his heels to see, a headless chicken flapped around the corner, traveling on its back, flapping up the dust. The hobbled girl hopped backward as it spattered blood on her feet and legs.

  Francis jumped to his feet, his trousers still down, as Queen Mother Bailey came around the corner after the chicken and saw them.

  “Look here, boy,” she said calmly, “you want to see what’s what, well now you see, so go on and find yourselves something else to do. Occupy yourself with children’s doings and keep your clothes on. You and that child help me catch that rooster.”

  The children’s embarrassment quickly passed as the rooster eluded them. But Grandmother was watching from the upstairs window. . . .

  Grandmother watched Queen Mother come back inside. The children went into the chicken house. Grandmother waited five minutes, then came up on them silently. She flung open the door and found them gathering feathers for headdresses.

  She sent the girl home and led Francis into the house.

  She told him he was going back to Brother Buddy’s orphanage after she had punished him. “Go upstairs. Go to your room and take your trousers off and wait for me while I get my scissors.”

  He waited for hours in his room, lying on the bed with his trousers off, clutching the bedspread and waiting for the scissors. He waited through the sounds of supper downstairs and he heard the creak and clop of the firewood wagon and the snort of the mules as Queen Mother’s husband came for her.

  Sometime toward morning he slept, and woke in starts to wait.

  Grandmother never came. Perhaps she had forgotten.

  He waited through the routine of the days that followed, remembering many times a day in a rush of freezing dread. He would never cease from waiting.

  He avoided Queen Mother Bailey, would not speak to her and wouldn’t tell her why: He mistakenly believed that she had told Grandmother what she saw in the chicken yard. Now he was convinced that the laughter he heard while he watched the wagon lantern diminish down the road was about him. Clearly he could trust no one.

  It was hard to lie still and go to sleep when it was there to think about. It was hard to lie still on such a bright night.

  Francis knew that Grandmother was right. He had hurt her so. He had shamed her. Everyone must know what he had done—even as far away as St. Charles. He was not angry at Grandmother. He knew that he Loved her very much. He wanted to do right.

  He imagined that burglars were breaking in and he protected Grandmother and she took back what she said. “You’re not a Child of the Devil after all, Francis. You are my good boy.”

  He thought about a burglar breaking in. Coming in the house determined to show Grandmother his private parts.

  How would Francis protect her? He was too small to fight a big burglar.

  He thought about it. There was Queen Mother’s hatchet in the pantry. She wiped it with newspaper after she killed a chicken. He should see about the hatchet. It was his responsibility. He would fight his fear of the dark. If he really Loved Grandmother, he should be the thing to be afraid of in the dark. The thing for the burglar to be afraid of.

  He crept downstairs and found the hatchet hanging on its nail. It had a strange smell, like the smell at the sink when they were drawing a chicken. It was sharp and its weight was reassuring in his hand.

  He carried the hatchet to Grandmother’s room to be sure there were no burglars.

  Grandmother was asleep. It was very dark but he knew exactly where she was. If there was a burglar, he would hear him breathing just as he could hear Grandmother breathing. He would know where his neck was just as surely as he knew where Grandmother’s neck was. It was just below the breathing.

  If there was a burglar, he would come up on him quietly like this. He would raise the hatchet over his head with both hands like this.

  Francis stepped on Grandmother’s slipper beside the bed. The hatchet swayed in the dizzy dark and pinged against the metal shade of her reading lamp.

  Grandmother rolled over and made a wet noise with her mouth. Francis stood still. His arms trembled from the effort of holding up the hatchet. Grandmother began to snore.

  The Love Francis felt almost burst him. He crept out of the room. He was frantic to be ready to protect her. He must do something. He did not fear the dark house now, but it was choking him.

  He went out the back door and stood in the brilliant night, face upturned, gasping as though he could breathe the light. A tiny disk of moon, distorted on the whites of his rolled-back eyes, rounded as the eyes rolled down and was centered at last in his pupils.

  The Love swelled in him unbearably tight and he could not gasp it out. He walked toward the chicken house, hurrying now, the ground cold under his feet, the hatchet bumping cold against his leg, running now before he burst. . . .

  Francis, scrubbing himself at the chicken-yard pump, had never felt such sweet and easy peace. He felt his way cautiously into it and found that the peace was endless and all around him.

  What Grandmother kindly had not cut off was still there like a prize when he washed the blood off his belly and legs. His mind was clear and calm.

  He should do something about the nightshirt. Better hide it under the sacks in the smokehouse.

  Discovery of the dead chicken puzzled Grandmother. She said it didn’t look like a fox job.

  A month later Queen Mother found another one when she went to gather eggs. This time the head had been wrung off.

  Grandmother said at the dinner table that she was convinced it was done for spite by some “sorry help I ran off.” She said she had called the sheriff about it.

  Francis sat silent at his place, opening and closing his hand on the memory of an eye blinking against his palm. Sometimes in bed he held himself to be sure he hadn’t been cut. Sometimes when he held himself he thought he felt a blink.

  Grandmother was changing rapidly. She was increasingly contentious and could not keep household help. Though she was short of housekeepers, it was the kitchen where she took personal charge, directing Queen Mother Bailey to the detriment of the food. Queen Mother, who had worked for the Dolarhydes all her life, was the only constant on the staff.

  Red-faced in the kitchen heat, Grandmother moved restlessly from one task to the next, often leaving dishes half-made, never to be served. She made casseroles of leftovers while vegetables wilted in the pantry.

  At the same time, she became fanatical about waste. She reduced the soap and bleach in the wash until the sheets were dingy gray.

  In the month of November she hired five different black women to help in the house. They would not stay.

  Grandmother was furious the evening the last one left. She went through the house yelling. She came into the kitchen and saw that Queen Mother Bailey had left a teaspoonful of flour on the board after rolling out some dough.

  In the steam and heat of the kitchen a half-hour before dinner she walked up to Queen Mother and slapped her face.

  Queen Mother dropped her ladle, shocked. Tears sprang into her eyes. Grandmother drew back her hand again. A big pink palm pushed her a
way.

  “Don’t you ever do that. You’re not yourself, Mrs. Dolarhyde, but don’t you ever do that.”

  Screaming insults, Grandmother with her bare hand shoved over a kettle of soup to slop and hiss down through the stove. She went to her room and slammed the door. Francis heard her cursing in her room and objects thrown against the walls. She didn’t come out again all evening.

  Queen Mother cleaned up the soup and fed the old people. She got her few things together in a basket and put on her old sweater and stocking cap. She looked for Francis but couldn’t find him.

  She was in the wagon when she saw the boy sitting in the corner of the porch. He watched her climb down heavily and come back to him.

  “Possum, I’m going now. I won’t be back here. Sironia at the feed store, she’ll call your mama for me. You need me before your mama get here, you come to my house.”

  He twisted away from the touch on his cheek.

  Mr. Bailey clucked to the mules. Francis watched the wagon lantern move away. He had watched it before, with a sad and empty feeling since he understood that Queen Mother betrayed him. Now he didn’t care. He was glad. A feeble kerosene wagon light fading down the road. It was nothing to the moon.

  He wondered how it feels to kill a mule.

  Marian Dolarhyde Vogt did not come when Queen Mother Bailey called her.

  She came two weeks later after a call from the sheriff in St. Charles. She arrived in midafternoon, driving herself in a prewar Packard. She wore gloves and a hat.