Eli the Good

  Nell watched in silence, too, her two front teeth perched on her bottom lip, her eyes wet with nostalgia or dread; I couldn’t tell which. Every time I looked at her too long, I always remembered the cancer that lived in her, and that same ice-water feeling ran all over me, which made me want to throw up.

  Josie caught me studying her, but she just looked at me for a split second, then back up to the sky. Then she whispered to me: “I wonder if anybody else is thinking of the Indians, and the slaves, and the immigrants, and the way soldiers got sent off to die.” Her eyes touched mine again. She seemed young again. “Do you think they are?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, very quiet, as if speaking too loudly might break some spell that had befallen us.

  “I keep thinking about this thing I learned in history class last year,” she said, watching the sky now. Her face went rose-tinted with the blast of a firework. “At Gettysburg, these soldiers got sent into battle and they knew they were gonna die, but they went anyway. Now that’s being brave,” she said. “So what they did is, they wrote these short little letters to whomever they loved. And the best part is that they tied or nailed the letters to the trees.”

  I could picture this: a woods above the battleground, decorated by hundreds of little papers filled with cramped, old-timey handwriting. “You know who I think about?” she said. “The soldiers who had to go and collect the letters off the trees the next day.”

  It was a strange thing to be thinking of on such a night, I guess, but somehow it made sense to me. I just nodded, seeing it all in my mind.

  Charles Asher had listened while Josie had related this story in her whispers. There was nothing on his face except puppy love for Josie, always there, along with that hollow look of pining he always carried, since he knew he could never completely have her. Charles Asher already knew something about longing, and his knowledge was aging him too early. Longing will eat you up from the inside out.

  Edie looked as sad as I felt. I knew that I had hurt her badly, but I didn’t know how to fix it. She and I had waited for this night for so long, and now I had ruined it. I watched her for the longest time out of the corner of my eye, wondering what she was thinking. I wanted to ask her but was afraid she’d cuss me out again. I hoped she wasn’t thinking about her mother, way off in Georgia and probably not even giving a second thought to where Edie was tonight. Edie had been doing okay with her mother’s leaving before I had put the hot coal of my words into her open, waiting wound. Her eyes were filled with sadness, but not tears.

  I looked out over the crowd, the faces being lit by all the different colors of the explosions, and wondered what they were thinking in this big silence that had spread over all of us. So many complicated thoughts and emotions and secrets. For a little while I felt like I was kin to everybody there, all connected by this night, this nation.

  After a long while I stopped watching the faces and the fireworks. Instead, I lay back on the grass with my hands behind my head and studied the moon, wondering what this celebration of fire would look like from up there.

  Picture my father’s turquoise Ford truck chugging down the road once it broke free of the traffic leaving the celebration. Now the road was open and he was driving the truck along the winding road with one hand at the top of the steering wheel, the other as lifeless as a dead bird atop his left thigh. My mother sat next to him, her head on his shoulder as the wind from the open windows came in to peck at her hair. They did not speak.

  Nell and Edie and I had climbed into the back of the truck after the fireworks. We had watched everyone loading up — people throwing chairs into trunks and truck beds, piling into cars. We saw an El Camino — we called it a “trar,” half truck and half car — that held twelve people. Children were strewn across their mothers’ laps in the front seats of Chevettes. Old women sat in folding chairs in the backs of trucks. Carloads of people nearly drunk with sugar bore small flags: the powder of funnel cakes still on their upper lips, the cotton candy moving in their stomachs, the stickiness of caramel apples on their fingers. The smoke from the fireworks drifted over the town like thin gray clouds.

  But now we were bumping down the road toward home. Nell leaned her head against the cab of the truck, and Edie and I sat tight against her on either side. She brought her arms out and put them around our shoulders. She smelled like the sandy rocks we gathered from the river, a sharp, clean scent. Edie and I were both exhausted from the celebration, but also from regret, sadness, and stubbornness. Those things will wear you out, will make you feel like a ghost floating through the world. The moon followed us and fell on Nell’s noble face. None of us spoke.

  And before I knew it, I had been lulled to sleep there with Nell warm against me and the hot night air swirling around us. Looking back, this is when I recall most clearly how it was to be a child. Only children know exhaustion like that, rest like that. Only a child could sleep so well and comfortably in the back of a pickup truck bobbing over a rough country road.

  When we got home, my father climbed up into the back of the truck and gathered me into his arms, hopped down, and carried me into the house. I can vaguely remember this. I came awake for a brief moment — long enough to hear the crickets crying out and to see the stars above me and to realize that I was in my father’s arms. He had not carried me in what seemed a very long time, and, being satisfied by this, I let my eyes flutter back together and immediately found my deep sleep once again.

  The next day Nell explained that she had walked Edie over to her house, talking all the way, and then she and my mother sat on the porch and chatted while they drank clinking glasses of ice water.

  Inside, my father laid me atop my bedspread, took off my shoes and jeans, then pulled the sheet up over me. I wonder if he leaned down and kissed my forehead or at least ran his thumb across my brow. I bet he did.

  Nell, who felt too awake to go to bed, had spread a quilt out on the backyard to watch the stars but fell asleep immediately, unaware of her own exhaustion. Josie would find her there — and, since she knew how Nell was, didn’t disturb her — when she came home at one in the morning, an hour late from curfew, and stumbled into bed.

  Cacophony had been one of Edie’s dictionary finds. That’s what the night sounded like, a cacophony of crickets and cicadas, calling out to the dark. Now look at our house, all the windows dark. Nell lying out in the backyard. I had kicked the sheet off me in my sleep and lay there in my T-shirt and underwear, breathing through my mouth, one arm up behind my head.

  Down the hall, my mother lay on her back, asleep, her hands folded on her chest in a casket pose. It always troubled me when I saw her sleeping like that because she always looked dead. My father was clad only in his briefs, lying on his side, his big shoulder rising up like a smooth hill. His underwear glowed when moonlight moved around the room and fell on the bed.

  We all had the peace of rest, for a time. But it didn’t last. By the time Josie got home, it was already over.

  I don’t know why I woke up. I was sleeping so hard, lost to blackness. But my mother managed to let one stifled scream escape her throat before he pressed his thumbs into the center of her neck.

  I sat straight up in bed, completely and instantly awake. I heard my own gasp as I startled. I sat very still, listening. Nothing for a time, then sounds of a quiet struggle. As if her mouth were full of water, I heard my mother say, “Don’t.” I jumped off the bed and padded down the hallway. Mom had opened all the windows earlier, and the sound of the crickets outside was nearly deafening. I don’t know how I had heard her call out over their singing. I walked through one last crooked patch of moonlight, and then I was at the door to my parents’ bedroom. They had left it ajar, and inside I could see a flash of movement that didn’t seem real. I pushed the door open with the tips of my fingers.

  Daddy was straddling my mother’s stomach, his knees pressed into the mattress on either side of her. He leaned over, strangling her with such force that both his arms were stretched o
ut firm and straight, pushing her down so that it appeared the mattress was swallowing her up headfirst. I could see the muscles in his back, taut and speckled by tiny beads of cold sweat. I could not see his face, which seems like a blessing to me now. He made no sound except for his heavy breathing, an animal panting after a long run.

  My mother brought one hand up, like someone drowning and reaching for the surface. She curled her hand into a claw and raked it down his arm, leaving thin red lines behind. This didn’t faze him. In fact, he seemed to be more intent on killing her. She began to kick her feet against the mattress, then brought her legs up and down as if running in place.

  I took one step farther into the room, stripes of moonlight falling on me from the edges of the shades in the windows. The shades breathed in a barely present breeze, then settled back against the windows again.

  Outside, the night sounds were screaming.

  Daddy was strangling her. I could hear a low, dry gagging in the back of her throat. The muscles in his back moved, flexed. The specks of sweat stood still, like clear beads that have spilled out on a brown table.

  One final kick from my mother. Her hand raised but then fell back onto the bed. More gagging, like someone trying to cough up rocks.

  The crickets and cicadas and katydids sounded louder and louder and louder on all sides of me, as if they had invaded the house and were easing their way toward me in a great, green circle.

  Daddy let out a short, halfhearted moan of grief or terror — I don’t know which — and then I somehow became unfrozen. I realized that I had been trying to make my mouth work and that it wouldn’t. But finally I was able to speak.

  “Daddy,” I said. A whisper, really.

  But I spoke loud enough for him to hear me, because he jerked his head around, and if not for the shadows of the room, I would have seen his dead eyes. Then he rolled off my mother, his arms limp in front of him, and crashed into the nightstand. I saw his head hit the edge of the little table and leave a short gash above his right eye. Blood bubbled up and leaked down his face. The lamp tottered like a top and then fell to the floor, too. The impact caused the dim lightbulb to come on, but the base broke into dozens of pieces. Daddy fell to the floor beside the bed. A piece of shattered lamp glass pierced his lower back, although I didn’t know that at the time. He curled in on himself and wrapped his arms about his calves, his knee pulled up to his mouth. I could see his back move with weeping now.

  My mother was lying flat on her back on the bed, and she drew in a great gasp of air, as if she were trying to suck in everything the room offered, a drowning woman out of the water. Then she sat up and put both hands to her neck, coughing and hacking from the back of her throat. She had not cried, had perhaps been too scared to cry, but she shuddered the way someone does after a meltdown. She looked up at me, then away, as if she didn’t want me to see her. I was frozen again, unable to move. Besides, a thin layer of broken glass lay on the distance between me and the bed. But my mother brought her arm up and curled her fingers in toward her palm, her eyes large on my own in the gray room. I stepped toward her with caution, using the tip of my bare foot to brush glass away before each step. When I got to the bed, Mom pulled me into her arms, folding me up in her own body. She pressed her flat hand against the side of my face, forcing the other side against her wet chest. She was drenched in her own and Daddy’s sweat.

  “He was asleep,” she strained to say, in a voice like rough wood. I knew that she was saying, Don’t worry. He wasn’t trying to kill me. It’s all right. I could hear all of that in those three small words. She put her hand to her throat and massaged it, running her forefinger over her windpipe. Even in the dim light I could see the bruises spreading out across her neck, the bruise on her shoulder, the redness of her cheeks, the sweat on her forehead.

  He did not rise up and beg our forgiveness or show us his face. He lay there, mostly unmoving. Every once in a while, though, there would be the click of glass that let us know he was uncurling his arm or legs. Sometimes we would hear the quake of his crying. I had never seen or heard my father cry before. I had not thought him capable of such a thing.

  Mom settled back against the pillows, worn out, and pulled me down with her into the crook of her arm. “The war,” she said. A witch’s voice. I thought she was reassuring herself. It took me a long time, years and years, to understand that she was just trying to comfort me. But back then I didn’t believe she cared anything about me.

  The night creatures, after having reached full hysteria, calmed down. Maybe because morning wasn’t too far away. But maybe because they were aware of what had just happened in our house.

  Unbelievably, impossibly, after a long time, I drifted back off to sleep as she trembled against me, as Daddy lay in the broken glass on the floor, trying to understand what was happening to him. I guess he spent the rest of the night that way.

  When I awoke in the morning, he was already gone to work. I found my mother at the stove, and at first I thought it had all been a nightmare. But then she turned from the stove where she was boiling an egg and her bruised neck was revealed to me. And then I knew that this was my life.

  My mother wore the purple bruises on her neck without shame. She didn’t situate herself in high-necked blouses or try to cover the marks with makeup, but walked around with the handprints on her neck. The only thing I ever heard her say about the bruises with any amount of worry was that she hoped they’d be gone by the time school started.

  “My students would have a field day with these,” she said one morning, looking in the mirror and poking at the discolorations, which were becoming green at the edges. “I can hear the rumors now about how the biology teacher’s husband tried to strangle her to death.”

  Something had changed in my father’s eyes. He didn’t look at my mother the same way anymore. He barely looked at her at all in those first few days after he’d strangled her in his sleep. Later I would understand that he was ashamed, that he felt guilty of something that was beyond his control. I imagine that at some point he turned to her and put fingers lightly on the bruises that decorated her tender neck, his eyes on hers. Silence splayed out between them like level water. I picture him apologizing to her in a trembling voice, the words caught somewhere halfway up his throat, finally pulling away as if startled, only to saunter away while she called out to him that it was all right. “Come back,” she’d call to him.

  I’m sure this happened at some point. But it was a long while before he could acknowledge properly what he had done. It is an awful thing to know that you have hurt the person you love most in the world.

  I ought to know, because my father and I had both damaged the most important people in our lives that Fourth of July. In many ways, the hurt I inflicted was worse. For one, I had done it intentionally — whether conscious of it or not, I had been trying to impress the boys — and I had also hit Edie with my words when she was at her most tender, shortly after her mother had abandoned her.

  My mother didn’t have to forgive my father because even when he was choking her, she knew it wasn’t his fault. When she placed any blame at all, it was on the war. Stella had happened by the day after and had burst out crying upon seeing the bruises on Mom’s neck. “You have to leave him,” Stella had said, but Mom just laughed. “It was just the war, Stella,” she’d said. “Just that old war.” For two weeks after that night, her voice was raspy and hoarse, her windpipe dented by his big thumbs. When her voice came back to normal, it occasionally went out on her, like a deeply scratched record album that causes the needle to jump ahead on the grooves. Entire words of a sentence would be mouthed but have no sound, lost in the cracks of her voice box. When this happened, she’d shake her head and cough up two words of explanation: “The war.”

  While my father shuddered at her touch, she became even more intent on saving him from his nightmares and flashbacks. My mother thought that most things could be healed by human touch, so she handled him as much as possible. During sup
per she would often lay her hand atop his, since he always kept his left hand lying on the table next to his plate. He would let this linger a moment, then slide his hand out from under hers, easy and quick, like someone ripping a tablecloth off without disturbing the dishes. She sat very close to him on the truck bench, lay her head on his shoulder when they sat on the porch glider. She was trying to convince him that she didn’t hold anything against him. He had tried to kill her in his sleep, but he hadn’t been himself; he had been out of his mind. A night terror, she called it. There was nothing for him to be sorry about, she said.

  She might have forgiven him, but I hadn’t. I thought that I might truly hate him. I wasn’t completely sure about that, but I do know that I was afraid of him. I was even jumpier than he was. One day I wrote this in my composition book: Daddy scares the hell out of me. I had never written a cuss word before. And still hadn’t said one, although Edie had.

  Several mornings I crawled beneath the screen porch, knowing that my mother and Nell were bound to talk about all of this at some point. The dirt was unnaturally cold there and populated by all manners of spiders, but I didn’t care. Reading Charlotte’s Web had cured me of any fear like that. I liked to put daddy longlegs on my palm and let them take high steps up my arm, amazed by how I could barely feel them. They must have weighed no more than an eyelash. I only regretted missing the best part of the morning to go riding. Pedaling through the morning mist was like speeding through a cloud, like flying, and I hated to miss that. But after only a couple mornings, my waiting paid off.