Papa acts like he wants to hit me with his fist, but can't bring himself to do it. So he runs into me with his chest, pushes me backward.
"Stop it, Papa. I'm warning you. I'm not taking it off you anymore."
"You're warning me! Goddamn! Didn't you hear that? He's warning me!" And he turns loose of the belt, turns around and starts to flail into me when Trish steps into the room.
"We're all warning you, Papa," she says. "We're not putting up with you're temper tantrums anymore." And Trish doesn't look mad or even determined for that matter. It's just like she has stated a fact.
Papa's afraid of Trish. He walks toward the kitchen. "Louise!" he shouts. "You come in here and help me deal with this kid. I'm not putting up with him anymore. Louise! Get Loretta on the phone. Get her over here. I haven't had anybody treat me like this since Lenny died." He bites his lip to keep from crying but he's not quite making it. And then he turns on me, again with tears in his eyes, but it's like he found a mean place in him that he's been saving just for me.
"Get your things and get out!" he says. "You're turning the whole family against me. You don't belong in this house. I'm not your father anyway. So get out! Pack your goddamn bags and get the hell out of my house!" Then he walks on through the kitchen, and I hear the backdoor slam.
And now here's Trish, smelling like a woman, with her arms around my neck. She's all sweaty and crying real hard. God, I didn't know she's so tall.
I walk outside through the front door knowing that mistakes don't come any bigger than the one I just made and wondering how Papa can say that he's not my father anymore.
CHAPTER 36: Helen's Ring
I step outside and take a seat on the front porch wondering what came over me. And now Papa doesn't even like me enough to claim me as a son. The thing that hurt most was that he sounded like he really meant it, that I'm not his son. I'm just sitting here thinking about this when up drives a pickup that I have seen before, but never at our place. It's Mr. McCallum's pickup that he hauls wood in from the lumberyard to his work sites. And Brenda's driving it. Brenda with another girl. At first, I think the other girl must be Phyllis because they're always together, then I see that it isn't at all. Brenda comes out of that pickup walking toward me and she has the other girl following along behind. Brenda's beaming.
"Bobby," she says, "I want you to meet my cousin, Helen."
Helen won't look up at me. Sure enough. She's the same girl Charles had with him at the show.
Brenda's still standing there. First she looks at Helen then at me. "Come on, you guys, talk."
Helen seems a lot younger standing here in front of me than when I saw her with Charles. Seems a lot smaller too. Her hair's a darker red than I've ever seen before. Even in the bright sunshine, it's the color of wine. Her lips are plain purple and fat like a bruise. She has a line around her lips where they become skin that's like a ridge and sharp like it's been drawn in with a pencil except that she doesn't have any makeup on. I have to remember that she was with Charles the night I tried to kill him. It's hard to keep that in mind while I'm looking at her. Knowing she was Lenny's girl.
"Maybe we should take a walk," I say. I start down the lane into our field and she falls in beside me. Brenda walks behind. Brenda doesn't look mad at me at all now. There's an old junkyard in Mr. Grissom's field where it joins ours. Not much to it, just piles of old used lumber, tangles of bailing wire, broken sections of cement pipe, pieces of old buildings. Mr. Grissom used to sic his dogs on us when he'd see us out here playing, back when Lenny was alive. I used to come here hunting with him. Ground squirrels and owls everywhere. Owls that live in the ground. Not many people know some owls do that. They live in old squirrel and rabbit holes.
I tell Helen about the owls and she listens. "'Come on, Bobby Ray,' Lenny would say. 'Let's go nip some rabbits in the bud,' because that's what I really liked, to find baby rabbits. We'd catch one once in a while and bring it home. I'd try to feed it grass or leaves or even a bowl of milk. Try to feed it right up until it died. 'Another one died of loneliness,' is what Lenny would say. I knew better, though. I knew it died because it wouldn't eat. I stayed with it all the time so I knew it couldn't have been lonely. I was just a little kid then." I'm just talking, telling Helen all this, when she stops me.
"You still miss him, don't you?" she asks.
"Lately, more than ever," I say. Let out a big breath of air. "It's been worse than when he died."
"Can you keep a secret?"
"That's one of my problems. I can't keep my mouth shut about anything anymore."
"Do you think you could handle just one? Brenda and I've been talking about Lenny's death for the last five years. Lately she's been trying to get me to talk to you. Now that I've met you, I can see why she thinks so much of you."
Her eyes are the darkest eyes I've ever seen. They don't even have a pupil, or maybe they are all pupil. It's hard to say which. She has on this sleeveless dress that's cut kind of low in front, shows a little skin in back too. She has dark skin like a natural tan only it's a little red, like her hair. And black eyebrows.
"I was more than friends with Lenny," she says.
"I know. You were his girl."
"I was more than his girl. And I want you to know this because it casts a different light on what happened to me and Lenny. Because Lenny wasn't true to me, Bobby. He was running around on me. And I was trying to hurt him by running around with Charles. I don't know why but I couldn't stay away from Charles. But I'm going to tell you something that no one else knows. Not even my father and mother. No one knows this, Bobby." And she walks me away from Brenda a little ways.
Brenda looks nervous. I wonder what that is all about?
Helen keeps going. "Not your parents, not my parents, not Brenda, not Charles. No one." She has a full load of tears in each eye now. And it's the strangest thing. She takes my hand. And it's the coldest hand I've ever felt. It's like her body doesn't have any heat. It's as if she needs the heat from my body to be able to say this.
I'm wondering if I really want to hear it. I'm in enough trouble already, and I'm beginning to learn that knowing things means trouble.
"Lenny had a hard streak. He could be the sweetest boy in the world when he wanted, but he could be real hard when he felt cornered. That's what he told me I did to him. I cornered him. He had so much ambition. All he thought about was baseball. Me and baseball were his life. Oil and water, he called us." Then she stops. She looks at me for a second, then back down at the ground. "Did he ever talk about me?"
I don't know what to say. I can tell that she needs to know that he did. But the truth is, he didn't. I guess I'm going to have to let her down. "He never talked to me about anything but baseball. Cept he cussed Papa for making him work when he wanted to play ball some in the summer and Papa said he had to work. Lenny never said that he was serious about a girl. I was a lot younger than him. But I remember him bringing you over to the house once. I think it was you. Seems like a hundred years ago."
"It does seem like it's been a long time, doesn't it? When he brought me over, that was the day after we did it."
"Seems like a dream," I say. I can't imagine Lenny with this girl. I can't imagine him kissing anyone. She just looks so soft and smooth all over. And she looks so young. It's like, the longer I talk to her, the younger she gets. I always think of Lenny as being so old.
"Brenda's been telling me how grownup you are." Her hand feels a little warmer now. "She's been telling me that you're different from everyone else. That you're a fine young man. She thinks the world of you, so I'm going to take a chance on you too. Cause I have to tell someone."
I start to tell her to stop. I have all I can handle right now. I wish I'd never gotten involved in trying to figure out what happened to my brother. It's just causing me so much trouble.
"I'd just turned eighteen. We were both eighteen."
I'm leaning up against an old windmill. It's a tall building with a lot of missing sideboard
s, slim with sloping sides and a flat top. The wheel doesn't turn anymore but the vane still points it into the wind. It creaks in the breeze.
"I'm looking for a ring," she says. "Do you know anything, anything at all, about a ring?"
"They buried him with his class ring. I know that because they had his hands folded across his chest. I saw him in his casket. He had his ring on."
"It wasn't that ring. It was another. Maybe your mother has it. It means more to me than anything else in the world."
"I don't remember another ring. Mama could have it in her cedar chest."
"If things could have only been different. If I could have told someone after he died, maybe it would have helped me a little. But at the Cemetery, there was Gretta all blown up like a balloon. All the trouble then was over her and Lenny. I couldn't tell anybody without making a fool of myself and even worse out of Lenny. So I let our secret be buried with him. At least I thought I did. But now Charles is back in town. I can't get away from this. It's like a sickness. Don't run around with him, Bobby. I saw you following him when I was with him the other night, and I'm concerned about you. I hated to be with Charles, but I had to find out if he had my ring. You distracted him just long enough that I got a chance to do a quick search of his car and his house. Lenny's journal isn't in his car anymore. Neither is my ring. I'm convinced that Charles doesn't have it either. He'd know more than he does if he had Lenny's journal. There's something strange about that Hudson but don't know what. Seems different somehow. But at least I got back some old clothes back. That was embarrassing." She starts crying and her face gets that tore up look about it. She pulls her hand out of mine. "It's hard to say this. But Lenny and I did it two months before he got killed. We went over and back in one day. Had to cut school. Got back from Reno late so both our parents were mad at us." She covers her face with her hands. "I've just got to find my wedding ring. It's all I have left. We got married, Bobby. Lenny and I were married."
*
This thing about my birth certificate not being with the rest of the family's and now Papa claiming that I'm not his son, has me to thinking, thinking hard. I have to do something I've been putting off for a long time. After Helen and Brenda leave, I get in my Chevy and drive to Merced. I need to see some hospital records and the hospital in Chowchilla is new so the records wouldn't be there. I guess I've been rubbing shoulders with Bev too long. Maybe it's not shoulders we've been rubbing against each other, but we've been doing it too long anyway. The woman behind the records desk at Mercy Hospital in Merced tells me that they don't have anyone at the files desk on Saturdays and besides, all the files are confidential and they can't let anyone but a doctor see them. So I go back to Chowchilla and stop at Dr. Wade's home. His daughter Billie looks glad to see me at first, but when I ask where her father is, she just gets huffy and says that he's at the hospital and goes back inside. Grace Magdalena is sitting in the hospital waiting room, she turns her head, won't look at me. And Dr. Wade's in the same place where they had Leroy only now he's with Brother Hensen, at least I think that's the Preacher's voice I hear. He's in a chair with his back to me. Dr. Wade has just said that needing a penicillin shot is not an emergency. Brother Hensen says that in the shape he's in, it is. Dr. Wade comes out to the reception desk because I'm raising a ruckus about seeing him. I ask Dr. Wade what he knows about Aunt Loretta trying to commit suicide, but he tells me that I better talk to my family about that. He's not supposed to discuss private family matters.
So I go from his office to the police station. I'll go to the County Courthouse in Madera if I have to. But I catch Brock about to get in his police car. I walk up to him.
"I know just what you're after," he says. "And I'm not signing that ticket until you get the steel wool out of those mufflers, so you might as well go on home."
I feel real bad about that because I just had some new glasspacks put on the other day. No steel wool.
"You got me all wrong," I say. "Can anyone look at police records?"
"Sure. Our records are public."
"I need to go back a few years," I tell him.
*
I've never seen Mama afraid of me before. It's almost sundown by the time I get home. "I've come back to get my stuff like Papa told me," I say. She keeps her head down and won't look at me. "But I'm not leaving here without having some questions answered. I've been down at the police station looking over their eighteen-year-old records. And I'm going to the County Courthouse in Madera if you don't talk straight to me. I know a baby was born by the name of Joseph Hershel Hammer on June 6, 1939 and I know that he died on July 10, 1939. You tell me that I was born on May 17, 1939, but I couldn't find a record of me. I know Aunt Loretta tried to commit suicide on August 7, 1939. I need to know the truth about Joseph and her. I want to know the truth about me. And I'm not settling for any less."
So Mama starts crying.
"For starters, I want to know where my birth certificate is."
"There isn't one."
"Jees, Mama." And already, I don't want to know the rest.
"You were born at home."
"Well who was Joseph? I thought maybe that was really my name."
Then Mama smiles at me through tears. "Okay, Bobby Ray. I guess it's time to get this one settled. This will put things back in their natural order."
Mama takes me into her's and Papa's bedroom, closes the door. She raises the top on her big cedar chest, digs down past the box with Lenny's, Trish's, and Curt's birth certificates that I looked through the morning after I talked to Charles under the bridge, and she comes up with a pink-paper candy box, has to take Papa's black revolver off the top of it. His pistol looks bigger than I thought it did. The lid of the candy box has blue and red flowers on it and some words that say HOOPER'S MY SELECTION CHOCOLATES. When she opens the lid, the first thing I see is a pair of tiny white baby shoes. Mama quits crying and just looks real proud.
"I got to keep my box of chocolates," she says. "But I had to bury my baby. This is all I have left of my baby boy, Bobby Ray." She bends over with heavy heaving sobs and falls to one knee. She won't let me help her up though. "You've done enough for me, as it is, over this sadness. If it hadn't been for you I wouldn't have lived a week past my baby boy dying. You brought me back from the black pit, Bobby Ray. Four years before, when Lenny was a baby, he wouldn't nurse. I don't think I ever really got over that. When baby Joseph was born, he was everything I ever wanted. He took to me good, but he had a bad heart. You and Joseph were born within a couple of weeks of each other."
"You mean, you're really not my mama?"
"That's right. At least not the one that gave birth to you. And that's the reason you don't have a birth certificate. Your Aunt Loretta is the one that gave birth to you. She had you at home and we never told anyone."
"Oh, Mama. No."
"We even buried baby Joseph with a quiet family funeral. Mr. Hickman was one of the few who knew he died. Almost no one knew about you. Most people think the two of you were the same baby."
"But how come you raised me, if I belonged to Aunt Loretta?"
"She had her reasons for giving you up. But let me go on with my story. Lenny and your papa weren't enough after baby Joseph died. I started out just being your wet-nurse because Loretta didn't have any milk. You were the hungriest baby I'd ever seen."
Somehow, I just can't imagine me feeding off of Mama's body.
"You took to my breasts like a fox sucking eggs. You even got mad about it when my milk was too slow coming and would butt my breast like a calf does its mother's udder and then you'd just squall. You'd get too mad to eat. Dr. Wade said that it'd be good for both of us, you and me. So all this time, and I know this has been unfair to you, but you've been living the life of baby Joseph for me. And since Lenny died, you've been living Lenny's life for your papa. He won't admit it, but it's true. So you've been carrying the burden of those two lives on your shoulders. It's time we quit doing that to you. Don't be too hard on your papa, thoug
h. He just had a real bad need for you to be someone you're not. He needed to correct some mistakes he felt like he made with Lenny, some things he thinks cost Lenny his life. He was trying to make up for it through you, and finally he just gave up. Now it's time for you to live your own life."
"But why didn't Aunt Loretta just keep me if I was her baby?"
"Talk to her about that. I know she wants to tell you herself. Give her that chance. The way you took to me liked to have killed Loretta, though. She wanted to nurse you herself. But even then she was talking about giving you up."
I walk away from Mama. I can't believe this. I stand in the corner, beat my head on the wall till it hurts.
"Come back over here, Bobby Ray. And quit hurting yourself. There is no reason to be that upset."
"I'm why she tried to commit suicide?" And I can tell that I've just hurt Mama's feelings. "She wanted to kill herself because I came along? She didn't want me?"
"That's not true, Bobby Ray. Sit down on the bed over there. I want you to shut up and quit feeling sorry for yourself because I'm going to tell you something. What you said is just not true. There's never been a mother on the face of this earth that loved her baby as much as Loretta loved you. I was even ashamed of myself for the way I loved Lenny after watching her with you. Loretta is not all there. And she knows it. I don't know why the Lord couldn't have blessed her with just a little more ignorance. She knew she was in no shape to raise a kid, so she gave you to us. She knew her big brother, Hershel, would see to it that you got raised proper. She was just a teenager when you were born. Just fifteen. Think of it. Just a few months older than Trish. She made the supreme sacrifice. Made it for you. And she's stayed with that decision all these years because it was the right one. But it killed her. Everyday of her life since then's been lived without the one person she loves most. And she hated herself so much knowing that she was no good for you that she tried to kill herself. More than tried. She did kill herself. Her suicide wasn't any mute cry for help. When Hershel first got her to the hospital, the doctors wouldn't even work on her. They said that no one could lose that much blood and live. She had no pulse, no blood pressure. 'She's already dead,' is what Dr. Wade said. Hershel just wouldn't have it. 'Well, look at her then, Hershel,' Dr. Wade said. 'Just look at her arms. They're laid open to the bone. She's bled herself like a heifer at slaughter. It's only been two months since she gave birth, for christsake. She's no bigger than a ten-year-old kid. She doesn't even weigh ninety pounds. She just didn't have the strength left to survive this.' Hershel backed Dr. Wade into the corner of that hospital room and told him if he didn't go to work on her that they'd be burying both of them cause Hershel was going to kill him."