them

  She froze. She did not call him. He might have been someone else’s child, a stranger’s child. She leaned against the rotted doorway and felt a giddiness rise in her, cut off from Jules by his aloneness, his being so unchildlike. Some days later, helping him wake out of a nightmare, she thought she knew what had frightened him so: that man’s head split in two, the top part sliced off. Jules had evidently pushed up close and seen it. She comforted him but could not understand how that sad fact had fixed itself so seriously into a child’s brain when it had already faded out of her own.

  6

  The countryside with its distant hills and aimless dirt roads formed him. All his life he would close his eyes upon a landscape of infinite regress, luring him forward as if he were swaying on the brink of a perpetual delirium, a child still trapped inside his adult’s bones. He ran away for the first time when he was six and was found fifteen miles away, by a farmer’s wife. “Little boy,” the woman said to him, her voice questioning and kindly, “who do you belong to?” He had stared in silence at this woman as if he did not think she was real. To talk like that, in such words, in such a melodious voice! To him there was something musical and distant about her—an ordinary farm woman in a dress and a man’s sweater, shivering in the early-morning air, her face mature and lined with thought the way his mother’s never was—and he stammered out his name, ashamed and perplexed. She drove him home herself, back to the high, gaunt, ugly Wendall house that was an eyesore even among the eyesores of the Huron Road, and there presented him to his mother and grandmother, and so the adventure had ended. When his mother wept angrily over him, he said, “I’m sorry, Ma, I’m sorry,” and it fell upon him like a blow that he had made her unhappy and that the two of them were bound together, irreparably. He loved his mother but he kept thinking of the woman who had driven him home, an older, frowning, serious woman, a real country woman. His mother had a pale plump face in which tears sometimes gathered without effort, creasing in the lines around her mouth, and Jules hated to see that. He hated to see his mother unhappy because she was so helpless at it, so weak.

  He dreamed about running away again, back to that farmhouse or to another like it. In the evenings he listened to “The Lone Ranger” and at school he leafed through piles of old books left in a back room, anxious to learn whatever he could; he borrowed comic books from the other kids, wanting to memorize everything. The next time he ran away he would run clear across the country and send his mother a postcard so she wouldn’t worry. But which direction should he run in? He dreamed about being The Lone Ranger. He played at being a horse, then at being the man who rode the horse, and at school he got frequent practice in running because older kids chased him for long, breathless, wordless minutes. They gave up in sullen admiration, never catching him. They said, “He runs like a deer!” Sometimes he turned back upon them with his fierce eyes, and they caught up to him and laughed from their superior height, sometimes letting him go, not hurting him. He had a breathless, jagged laugh. Angry or excited, he began to stammer. They said to him, “How’s the old hermit? You his little boy, or what?” The right taunts could drive him wild and he would rush at them, kicking and punching. They began to say of him, marveling, “Jules Wendall is a crazy little kid.”

  When he was quiet, though, he could pass for an ordinary child. At school he worked in his coloring book (this was the main instruction for first grade), coloring in outlines of people and animals and trees with the same dutiful neatness as the other children, though he sometimes colored things the “wrong color”—he learned that there were wrong colors and right colors and that it was important he didn’t mix them up. And he was fascinated by maps—the old ripped maps in the classroom that could be pulled down over the blackboard, or maps of the war in newspapers, those tiny, flattened-out replicas of a terrain he might someday actually see. The war interested him though he did not know what it was. He could watch on the maps the advancing and retreating armies, and imagine himself with them, crossing mountains and rivers, flowing along in great numbers, adding up all the distances of the world. Sometimes Loretta let him play with the deck of cards—she herself was always playing solitaire—and he imagined a loose, complicated game in which a turn of a card meant a victory for one army, a defeat for the other, and in his mind’s eye the newspaper map would be amended. The turn of cards was not something he had power over, though he turned the cards. He could not help what the cards might be and, in a sense, he could not help turning them. In a kind of daze, very quiet, obsessed, he would sit at the old dining-room table for hours, flipping cards, looking from the cards to the map in that night’s newspaper, squinting, worried over what he was doing. Somewhere on that map his father, his actual father, was marching.

  But when Loretta talked about his father, a soldier, carrying a gun and sent God knows where, he tried hard to believe it but couldn’t. He tried to think of his father as a soldier, but he kept seeing a slack-bellied man in the front room, drinking beer, waiting. What had his father been waiting for? His father hadn’t even played with the deck of cards, as Loretta and Jules did. What was being played out for him, which cards were being turned over, he hadn’t even interest enough to find out—it was being done for him, no matter. And so his father had waited. And his mother now walked in a half-sullen, half-content dream around the house, waiting, barefoot or wearing old run-over moccasins like the kind his Aunt Connie wore, and his grandfather went out to work a few mornings a week (he was a janitor for the high school), and his Uncle Fritz, that embarrassing, mumbling old man, slept in a kind of perpetual sleep in his back room—all of them waiting, but waiting for what?

  Only Jules and his grandmother, that garrulous old woman, were awake. They were first to see a car or a truck come in sight along the road; they were first to get to the door if someone turned in the driveway. The two of them woke early in the morning, anxious to get up—Grandma Wendall to begin the day’s cooking, for the canning of fruit maybe, or to begin the wash, and Jules to check the traps he kept down by the creek—because it seemed to them that time went by feverishly, and that there was never enough of it. At times, so restless he could not sit still, he clowned his exasperation at having to wait for other people—he was always waiting for his sisters, waiting for his mother, who had all the time in the world. “Sit still, Jules!” Loretta would snap, made clumsy by his impatience. But he could spend hours lying in the front room reading a book or looking through maps, things he sometimes stole from school; he had the intense, quiet look of a child plotting something. In general he could pass for an ordinary child. His bones, his face, his intelligent eyes, his nicked and scabbed knees—all were signs of ordinary life. But a certain feverishness set upon him often, especially at bedtime, and when people scolded him he could not help imitating them, his little face peaked and daring and insolent. Even his grandmother would cry out, “Jesus Christ! You’re going to get all that snottiness whipped out of you!”

  One day he was playing in one of the barns, a barn that had been partly burned down years before, and his sister Maureen came out to watch him. Sometimes he ignored her, pretending she was not there, sometimes he drew her right into his games, grateful for her. He did not know, himself, whether he liked her or was embarrassed by her. He was a little jealous of the slow, stubborn, passive power she had—she got her way by looking sad and defiant, not by whining and jumping around the way he did; he sensed that she was not so interesting to older people as he was but that these people loved her better. Maureen came out to watch him play magic. He was a magician; he could create things with his hands, in the air, outlining them again and again in swift, skilful strokes. Maureen, sitting and watching him, could create nothing. She watched. He was so insistent that he could almost make her believe she saw something. “Now do you see it, a rabbit hut? Look at it, dummy, it’s right here!” He was squatting in the hay. Maureen stared down at him with her mild, rather empty green eyes, a not very clean child in a very short cotton dr
ess, barefoot, with a long dotted scab on her leg ready to be picked off. Jules, suddenly irritated, took a box of matches out of his pocket, which he had stolen from the kitchen. With the box held high in one hand and the other hand moving in magic circles around it, he called out a complicated vocabulary, mainly having to do with kings, queens, jacks—the cards that were for him mysterious and powerful—and Maureen leaned closer, watching him in fascination.

  He took out a match and lit it.

  “That’s bad,” Maureen said.

  “Why is it bad?” Jules said.

  “You’re bad.”

  “I’m burning the rabbit hutch myself—it’s mine to burn up!”

  It seemed to him that the flame of the match belonged to him, that it had something to do with the words he had uttered. No one else knew those words. He stared at the match, and when the flame stung his fingers it seemed somehow a mistake, an insult. He shook out the match and lit another one at once. A few yards away, scratching one foot with the toenails of the other, his sister stared at him, smiling. He felt that he had her now. She could not look away from him if she wanted to.

  He let the match drop into the hay. “I can do this too. I can do anything,” he said.

  He squatted in front of the little fire, lost in a sudden reverence for its power. He tried to cup it and hold it down small between his hands. But it took hold, growing. It made a crackling sound. He remained there, staring at it, before it occurred to him that he had made a mistake. Then he jumped to his feet and tried to stamp the fire out. The hay was dry, and the fire took hold with energy, moving backward out of his command. His skin stung with the sharp heat that was so suddenly on its own and had nothing to do with him or his words.

  “We better get out of here!” he said, but he was still transfixed by this magic, slowed down. He and Maureen stared at the flames. A pile of hay caught fire in a small soft explosion, a puff, which amazed Jules. He had never seen anything like it. The other fire he had seen, the other big fire, was the airplane fire, and that had been boiling and vicious, flames rising as high as a house, out of control. The memory of that other fire stirred him.

  He said to Maureen, sharply, “You better get out of here.”

  She remained staring, transfixed. It might have been that she was waiting for him to touch her, to release her. “Did you do all that?” she asked slowly.

  “I said you better get out.”

  “Could you burn down everything by yourself? Like that?”

  The fire began to spread in several directions now, still skirting him as if aware of his power, but at the edge of his vision it was leaping and taking on an energy the match’s thin flame had never hinted at. Hayseeds and dust on a rafter caught fire in a quick liquid-like spreading, running up toward the cobwebbed roof like lightning in reverse, striking Jules with its beauty. He backed up. He took hold of Maureen, but she pushed his hand away, staring at the fire.

  “Could you stop it now?” she said.

  “You goddam dumb baby, how dumb can you be! You want to burn up?” he said. He dragged her to her feet. They crawled out through a back window and hid.

  The barn suddenly exploded into flames. Jules and Maureen hid by a stone wall not far away, watching in silence. People ran out of the house, Grandma Wendall was yelling, Connie was amazed, Loretta, taken by surprise, was buttoning a housedress around her. Jules whispered to Maureen, “We can say it was a thunderstorm. We can say it was hunters.”

  The firetruck arrived too late. The barn was lost. When the excitement was over and everyone had gone home, Jules came out to be whipped. His grandmother did the whipping. It was a silent, sweaty event, with no one else around. Grandma Wendall had said to Loretta, “I don’t want you bawling too. Go in the house!” Jules did not cry for a while, resisting the terrible pain of the stick his grandmother was using. She yelled at him, “Come on and cry, you little bastard!” He could hear the stick moving through the air, its sinewy sound. He seemed to hear it strike him an instant before it actually struck. From his buttocks, down his thighs and down his legs, blood began to run, quickly, and only when he knew what it was did he start to cry. He was very frightened. Grandma Wendall gave up and threw the stick at him in disgust, and the whipping was over.

  She yelled, “You’ll wind up in the electric chair and I’ll pull the switch!”

  7

  Loretta often walked with the children to town, having nothing to do and wanting to get away from Grandma Wendall. She went to the drugstore and bought Cokes for all of them, and, once there, settled, she would glance around as if prepared to see someone she knew—but not surprised at seeing no one—and take out the letters that she carried in her purse. She would spread them out on the sticky table top of the booth. They had been folded and unfolded so often that they were about to fall into pieces. They were from home, she said. She read to them, her face serious and fixed for reading:

  Dear Loretta,

  How are you? Long time no see. How is Howard? This place is getting next to me here, how is the country? Please write. Did you know that Sissy E. is in the convent? There’s nobody much around this place now. My heart could break, it’s so slow.

  And another letter, which Jules knew wearily by heart and could have recited:

  Dear Loretta,

  Guess what I am in Detroit! Did you wonder who was writing you from Detroit? There is this man Leonard who I have gotten to know and who is a Detroit boy from way back. Come and see me sometime. There’s a lot going on here. Youd be surprised at all the niggers here. Come see me Loretta and the hell with his mother.

  She puzzled over these letters, which were scrawled on thin blue stationery in pencil, and looked up at Jules as if to see what he thought of them. Jules finished one Coke and waited for another. Sometimes she bought him another, if she felt right about the letter and what it might mean. And they all wanted to stay away from home as long as possible, though it was hard with a baby fretting and Jules impatient at having to sit in one place. Loretta didn’t want him to run free in town since the time he had gotten lost, though she knew well enough that he had run away on purpose, avoiding them. “Anyway you might get hit by a car,” she said. She looked through her letters. She licked her lips, thinking. And one day, in the same booth in which she always sat, she spread the letters out before her and, reading them, her lips moving slightly, she drew herself up straight and Jules saw a change come over her, over her face. She frowned, her eyes darted around the table just once, her hands pressed themselves palm downward on the table top. She must have decided something.

  That night, after supper, she told Mama Wendall she was leaving. “I and the kids are going to Detroit,” she said.

  And thereafter followed a long, noisy evening, a fight of whining words and threats—Loretta reckless and shrill, Mama Wendall belligerent though she remained seated, her face contorted with anger. Jules went at once to look up Detroit on the map. He was a little disappointed that it wasn’t farther away. Loretta kept backing up, a smile pulling her face slightly out of shape, as if it were someone else’s smile, not hers. “Oh, you big old horse!” she cried finally, “you let me alone! I’m free to go where I want!”

  “You were a whore once and now you’re going back to be one again!”

  “You shut up! Don’t you talk about me like that in front of these kids—and it isn’t true, none of that is true!” Loretta screamed. She was very pale, backed against the kitchen wall, screaming. The children looked on in silence. They looked from their mother to their grandmother and back again, trying to calculate who would win. Loretta cried, “You and your big mouth—all these years I had to take it! Now you and your mouth can shut up, goddam old bitch of a horse, a cow! Bitch, bitch, bitch!” She started to sob. She ran out of the room.

  “You can see that your mother is crazy,” Grandma Wendall said quietly to Jules.

  But Jules’s heart was pounding with excitem
ent; he knew he wouldn’t sleep that night. He got up around five and got dressed to wait for the others. Grandma Wendall made breakfast for him, silently, ponderously, and when she heard someone waking upstairs she said to him, “You could always stay here, not go with her. You could stay here with me.”

  “No,” said Jules.

  “You don’t have to go where she takes you. You’re your father’s son too.”

  “No,” said Jules sadly.

  To save shame, Papa Wendall drove them to the nearest bus depot instead of letting them walk, as Loretta had threatened. So they dressed up as if for church and looked at one another with nervous smirks, Loretta like one of the children herself. Papa Wendall had nothing to say to them. He let them out at the bus depot and drove away.