Connie did not get out of the car. “With a fat bottom like that you should get out, get some exercise for a change,” her mother said, but not unkindly. Now that they had left the city and were on their way to a new life—her idea of a new life—she was rather pleased.
Loretta stood near her because of the baby. If Mama Wendall should drop him—if anything should happen to that baby, Loretta thought, she’d stick a scissors into that old bitch’s throat. She hated Mama Wendall. But Loretta put on a good show in front of everyone, trying to get Howard to cheer up and Connie to be friends and the old man to talk once in a while; after all, they were going to live together from now on, and shouldn’t they all be friends? But out of the whole bunch only Mama Wendall was chatty, and her chattiness somehow went around Loretta, excluding her. It was peculiar.
Sometimes she said to Loretta, with a sharp smile, “Is this baby in a fever?” or “Is this baby wet again?” And Loretta was annoyed to see how very shrewd, how very knowing, were the old woman’s eyes, fixed upon what was young and therefore helpless in Loretta, knowing how to seek it out.
There was a forlorn sensation in her, rising often, out of melancholy and weary joy, that everyone who was born must be a person—one person only—and that this personal, private, nameless kernel of the self could neither be broken down nor escaped from; so she smiled vaguely back at Mama Wendall’s evil smile, thinking, Well, I’m young enough, I can take it; or thinking, He saved me from something terrible, Howard did, and after that doesn’t my life belong to him and his family?
In that family there were odd people, far-flung and secretive. The most interesting was Howard’s older brother Samson, who was a tool-and-die maker in Detroit, at Ford’s, evidently doing well but reluctant to send money home. They spoke often of Samson, sometimes bitterly, sometimes with pride, sometimes to put down Howard, who had been fired, after all, from a lousy job and was on his way to a lousier one. Howard never spoke of his brother, never. There was an aunt of fifty who was a nun, who’d left her order and returned to it again, and of her everyone said, “She’s crazy but harmless.” And there was this uncle of Howard’s to whose house they were going. His name was Fritz and he was over seventy. He was a hermit, they said, and needed “bringing out” into the world again. Mama Wendall said he needed a woman around the place to get it clean and to feed him right. The farm was on the outskirts of a small town. Everywhere around this town the farmland was deserted, because farmers had sold their land and moved out years ago, escaping the Midwestern dust and drought and on their way to the cities, headed for government buildings, for welfare, for unemployment. But Fritz hadn’t enough sense to sell, they said, and so he had stayed, and the town was recovering slowly, the gypsum plant had reopened, and they were on their way with a truck full of furniture and crates and boxes, to settle down forever. As Mama Wendall said, “America is really the country, not the city. People should live in the country. The country is a better place than that smelly city for a baby. Look what the city did to Howard.”
That first month out in the country Loretta lay awake many nights and wept, hearing the old house creak, feeling the darkness stir with soft-winged insects around her, everything mysterious and damp. She thought of the lovely dirty city with its municipal buildings of fake marble and its department stores and elevators and its scrubby open parks where anyone might meet. She cast her mind back to the look of the muddy canal and its high, built-up banks, that frightening look of a canal with steep sides into which you might fall to drown helplessly; she lay with her back against Howard’s back, sore-eyed, beaten-down, the words of Mama Wendall dinning in her ears just as the oppressive, heaped plates of Mama Wendall’s kitchen table taunted her, now that she was pregnant again and inclined to nausea—everything was too much, too much. Out here in the country—out here, in this mysterious cricket-filled country, where anything might happen and yet nothing at all ever happened, where Howard went to and from his unexciting work and ran into no old friends, got into no particular trouble, was spiritless, dull, fat—out here there was good clean fresh air for the baby but nothing else. Loretta wept for her lost city and its dirty air.
Overcome by Mama Wendall, she and Howard had little to say when they were finally alone. It was as if his mother were still in the room with them, considering them with her ponderous lined brow, judging them. She had a head like a statue’s head, a marvelous ugly brow, sharp green eyes. If her body was cowlike or bearish, like her son’s, still her eyes were cruelly wise and let nothing get by. Howard was slowing down, getting fat, and him not yet thirty, Loretta thought in a panic, letting himself go already! She twisted in her bed, thinking of this monster of a woman and her son, the two of them arm in arm, and she, Loretta, standing bitter and helpless on the outside: the wife, the mother, the pregnant girl left outside. Her heart filled with bitterness.
The house in which they lived was like an old barn, and behind it were old rotted barns, one of them partly burned down from a fire that had been caused by lightning. Many of the trees around the house had been struck by lightning and scarred. Loretta took that for a sign of bad luck; nothing was ever struck by lightning in the city, but out here, out in the open, lightning could sweep in anywhere. Everything was too open. They lived on a dirt road, on the top of a small hill. Torrents of rain rushed down that hill in a rainstorm and gathered into pools that stood around for days, down in the apple orchard; and there was a real stream, not far away, fed by smaller streams and ditches, where Loretta took Jules to play, half-hearted herself while the child laughed with delight. If Jules had not been with her to keep her vision focused up short she would have gone crazy, but Jules was enough; his very energy and querulousness were enough to keep her occupied. In the kitchen Mama Wendall was boss, and she herded both Loretta and Connie around, giving them orders, teasing them, getting them to stand straight with a sudden poke of her elbow; and outside during thunderstorms the flashes of lightning came dangerously close, terrifying Loretta; and the old house was infested with cockroaches and mice, and even rats might come in freely to have a look at the new tenants. But still she had Jules and she was pregnant again; that kept her sane.
Summer passed. Another winter passed; they were snowed in for a week, gathering together out of frustration and hatred, all but Mama Wendall—she seemed to enjoy it. She enjoyed “emergencies.” She strode through the house giving orders, stuffing newspaper into the cracks around windows, putting on her husband’s overshoes and coat and going out to fool around with a shovel in that impossible snow. Before spring came Loretta had another baby to take care of, and her life had settled down into a dull hypnotized routine of housework and babywork under the dominion of her mother-in-law. The men of the house were usually silent. Howard’s silence expanded weekly, daily; he seemed to be sinking into middle age, and whatever life he had by himself on those occasional days when he didn’t come right home from the mine Loretta knew nothing about and couldn’t ask him. She didn’t dare ask him. Howard was a father now, one of the fathers of the world, preoccupied with work he hated and sullen with the daily effort of his own body, so sluggish and stubborn. He was stirred to an uneasy awakening by Jules’s liveliness—Howard would say, “Get that kid off my back”—but pleased somehow by the new baby, Maureen, who slept much of the time and caused no trouble. Howard would sit staring into the baby’s crib for long stretches of time. Jules didn’t seem to notice his father’s indifference but was all over the place with his enthusiasm—a boy with dark brown, slightly curly hair, dark eyes, long dark eyelashes. When he got too noisy sometimes Loretta gave him a few swallows of beer, in exasperation, to quiet him down. She drank beer herself now, to quiet her nerves. Between the baby Maureen and the child Jules, Loretta supposed she had to prefer Maureen, who, after all, was a female but she had the idea that Jules was the sharpest one: Mama Wendall believed that the first-born was always the sharpest. She had a positive faith in brains. Though Jules sometimes stammered, this was
just his hurry to get things said, she thought; it meant that he was faster than anyone else. People who got ahead, people on the radio—H. V. Kaltenborn was her particular favorite, for some reason—were cited for their brains, which meant their slyness, a kind of mild criminal facility that put them ahead of all the nameless people of the world, like the Wendalls. For certainly her people were anonymous, backward, exasperating, Howard in his silence and Papa Wendall with his radio (he had hurt his back that winter and could no longer work), not to mention poor fat Connie with her daydreams, waiting for a man, and the owner of this big drafty house, Fritz, a man who sat down to supper in dirty overalls, smelling of sweat and dirt, a faceless silent man no one noticed.
The seasons passed in all this masculine silence, and only Jules broke the spell with his cries and complaints and laughter. Sometimes amazed at the son she had borne, Loretta blossomed in spurts, singing out in the back yard as she hung up the heavy wash, or smiling to herself, as if she had done something very clever, not knowing how she had done it. Just before Howard left for the war she became pregnant again, for the third time. With a kind of idle curiosity she considered that this was maybe her third child by Howard and maybe only her second. She could never make up her mind whether Jules looked like Howard or like Bernie Malin; sometimes she thought one way, sometimes the other. But all that energy! that charm! She lay awake beside her sleeping husband and dreamed of Bernie, imagining him alive, smiling happily into the dark and imagining him in her arms. Jules had Bernie’s energy and charm, that was certain.
Like other people in the area, they took to listening closely to newscasts and reading newspapers; they talked to people in town, comparing news of sons and husbands and nephews. Everyone was drawn together, worried and angry. Loretta listened to all the talk she could get. She liked to listen to talk, the talk of women, being drawn to them and soothed by them, even by their baffled anger. She thought of Howard “over in Europe” and tried to imagine what his life was like. But she could not feel it; she could not imagine that Howard himself felt it, that it got into his bones and made any difference to him. She imagined him sitting somewhere, his gaze fixed on something close to him, with a look of being half-asleep though he was wide-awake and sullen. But when any of the women asked her about him she answered quickly and brightly, “I just got a letter!” or, if she hadn’t heard for a while, she would answer sadly, her eyes searching their eyes for sympathy, “There hasn’t been any news.” When Howard came home, she thought, all this sympathy would end. No one would ask her about him again. And in the midst of thinking about Howard she would find herself thinking about Bernie again, imagining him in a soldier’s uniform. It was easier to imagine Bernie than to imagine Howard. One came to the eye faster than the other, that was all.
Meanwhile Jules grew fast, eating everything Mama Wendall gave him, cleaning the plates set before him heaped with potatoes and noodles and rice and vegetables, with a few chunks of fatty meat, his slight frame burning everything up. He was a noisy, joyful child and Loretta could not help loving him best. He followed her everywhere; he followed his grandmother everywhere; he disappeared and turned up at neighboring farms; he played with children older than himself, not afraid of them. He was not afraid of anyone. Loretta, cautious in the way of a city girl, wondered at all the nerve this kid had and the distance he could travel—sometimes, riding with Papa Wendall on her way home from town, she saw the little boy playing in a ditch with some other children or walking along the road in a grownup’s hurry, only a child and so strangely independent. If they slowed down for him to get in he’d say, “No, don’t want to,” and wave them on, or jump across the ditch and run off into a field. He was like a wild animal, running off when they called him; then he turned up later, surprised at their anger. He was perverse and willful, a mysterious child, and Loretta began to think he must be a little strange in the head to sit as he did on the stone steps of the district schoolhouse, waiting for recess or noon hour; he was only five years old, too young for school, but the building itself drew him. He hung around it all day and went back after supper sometimes, just to hang around.
There were times when he came home smudged and bloody, his clothes ripped, and it was Mama Wendall who bathed him and gave him advice. Loretta angrily tried to get between them, almost stammering herself, saying, “That’s the last time you play with that little bastard!” But Mama Wendall ignored her and said to Jules, with the solemnity of a horse, “You just keep fighting back. You got to make your own way.” Jules escaped her too, a sly child, and went wherever he wanted to go, unmoved by stones thrown at him or taunts about his great-uncle, that crazy hermit.
Loretta would scream at him that if he wasn’t good his father would never come back home. His father, she said, would bring back another little boy and kick Jules out—how would he like that? “I’ll go sleep in the Bentons’ barn,” Jules said, being practical. He showed no anxiety. Loretta, giving in, wondered why she had thought he would show anxiety. What was the use of it? It did no one any good. So she gave him beer to drink to quiet him down when he was unmanageable, and sometimes she spanked him when he kept climbing out of bed. She went out of her way to be loving to the little girls, excluding Jules, but he seemed to know he was her favorite, the only real man in this tomb of a house of silent men; Howard, gone off to the war, was no more silent in his absence than he had been at home. Jules made the house shake with his running. They glanced at each other, Loretta and Mama Wendall, and shared a sly secret pride at having produced this boy at least—the rest was nothing much.
One Saturday everyone except Fritz went to town to see something spectacular that had happened—a two-passenger plane had crashed somewhere. The volunteer firetruck was pulled up off the road, firemen were working in the midst of flaming rubble and junk, and around them was a ring of people drawn in great excitement to the billowing black smoke from a fuel fire. The air was vibrating in spasms from the heat. It looked as if it were shivering, in violent anticipation of seeing something awful. The firemen were all old or middle-aged, and the men who watched were either old or middle-aged, or they were boys, so it seemed to Loretta that this crash was an event through which she might stare vacantly, her gaze caught by no man’s body and her own body not involved in anything. She was quite free, protected. She was slightly heavy now herself from Mama Wendell’s starchy meals, and she never bothered with makeup or fixing her hair. She was a solid-footed peasant girl with a tan from the sun, and with the newest baby, Betty, in her arms, and Maureen toddling alongside her, and Jules running ahead, she made her way over to all the excitement, drawn by the noise. In just such a catastrophe Howard might be lying at this moment, burning, exploded out of his bones’ sluggishness, but that thought was really not believable. It was said that the men in this crash were officials of some kind, from the state government, men unlike Howard and fated to die a sudden, flaming death—unlike Howard, who would probably come home looking just the way he did when he left.
Loretta paused at the edge of the crowd, staring. She did not really want to see anything much. The fire was enough for her. She had never known the air could shrivel like that, shuddering with heat; and she’d never seen or heard such a fire! So this was what those photographs of burning planes were all about—the billowing, gulping noise of a gasoline and oil fire, a queer sound that put her in mind of sheets flapping on a clothesline. Grass burned around the plane. Weeds caught on fire and shriveled in a second, flame illuminating their dark kernels and then blinding them and, in another second, wasting them away to nothing. She stood transfixed, not wanting to see anything more. Everyone else was pushing forward, chattering. Kids were running loose. Jules had pushed through to the very front, slipping out of her grasp. She saw a woman shove him backward, but he caught his balance at once and edged forward again. Loretta called out, “Jules! You get back here!” Then she lost sight of him. The crowd trampled field grass and strained inward, looking to see the very center of that f
laming wreck, not content with seeing less than everything. Someone cried out. There was a chorus of exclamations—surprise, amazement, a kind of despair. Loretta turned away, not wanting to see, but not very upset and vaguely annoyed only by the heat and all these people and Jules getting away— why was everything such a bother, she thought, why was she always unhappy?
She strolled back to town. She came across Connie in the drugstore, talking with a boy with a sunken chest who worked there, and she asked Connie if she’d seen Jules. Jules had got away. No, Connie hadn’t seen him, so Loretta walked around with Betty in her arms and Maureen fooling around alongside her, feeling lopsided without Jules tugging at her other side. People were coming back from the fire. They were still chattering about the bodies. Loretta didn’t quite want to hear what people were saying, but she could make out that one of the men had had the top of his skull sheared right off—“like with an ax.” Hearing this, Loretta looked away primly. Her face shifted into a grimace of horror and then shifted back, untouched.
They couldn’t find Jules. Mama Wendall went around asking for him while Loretta sat, exhausted, in the truck. They went to the sheriff’s office and reported a boy missing. Then they drove home. Loretta felt her head ache with an unreal, unclear sense of loss: a husband gone, a son gone, was this possible?
She did not sleep all that night. Mama Wendall made coffee and clucked around, keeping watch in her bedroom slippers and housedress. “Don’t worry, kids come back. They always come back,” Mama Wendall said. Loretta was too tired to listen. Near morning the old woman finally went to bed and Loretta wandered outside. She walked around the cleared-off part of the farm, testing her body by touching her hips and thighs and stomach, asking herself who she was and how she had come to be so exhausted and old when nothing permanent had really happened to her. She had thought certain things were permanent, fixing her, but she had been mistaken. Nothing was permanent yet. Nothing had fixed her yet. She happened to look in one of the barns, and there she saw someone—it was Jules. He was sitting with his back to her, in the hay, a small child, very still, just sitting. It was frightening that he should sit like that, so still. She could hear him saying something, talking to himself. A rapid, frightening mumble…a kind of breathy argument. Probably he was stammering, which she hated, the beginnings of words stumbling over themselves and piling up so that nothing could get loose, as if he were choking, so small a boy, suffocating with the urgency to speak. She had come upon him often in the past and heard him talking to himself. If she caught his attention he would get up and walk away with dignity. But now she was a little frightened to come upon him like this, alone and not needing her. And there was something dark and strange about the place he was hiding in. Why hadn’t he come up to the house? He was hiding from them. He was hiding from them and talking to himself, arguing out something. He seemed both angry and scared.