Scowler (6 page)

He spent a week of early evenings swinging away at a stringed ball he had hung from the branch of his favorite tree, with the assumption that it would be an irresistible lure for Marvin, who would come out, smoothing his mustache in appreciation, and expound upon the physics of a good curve-ball. Instead, the shouts and slapping noises from inside came more frequently than usual.

For the first time in Ry’s young life, the yields were off. The recent wheat harvest was thin and the hay crop seeded beneath already showed signs of frailty. If the hay was weak, the cows would eat poorly. If the cows ate poorly, their milk production would suffer. If Grade A production suffered, more time would be spent outside the milk barn to compensate, and they might be caught off guard when the state health inspector made his surprise visit. In fact, a jealous neighbor
might see to it. Each night Ry heard these theories coming from the eastern windows. He could not think of anything to help the cause, aside from becoming a better batter.

That was not to happen. One night after supper Marvin stormed outside in bare feet and ripped the bat from Ry’s hands. “Security!” he hollered as he made his way back toward the house. Rounding the corner, he shook the bat at the stars: “Security!” Not only was the taking of the bat sudden but to Ry even the logic seemed strained. The baseball bat would somehow deter vindictive neighbors better than the Winchester? Ry didn’t believe it, but he was only ten. What did he know?

Whether or not Marvin’s original intent was pure, the bat soon took on a more sinister purpose. What set him off the first time was the discovery of a small mending job that Jo Beth had taken on for Mrs. Horvath down the road. The idea that their imbecile neighbors might think Marvin Burke’s family needed a single goddamn cent more than what he brought in was abhorrent. Ry immediately noticed the change in the quality of nighttime noises. Impacts had a lower pitch; what formerly snapped now had the sound of a sad and gigantic heartbeat:
Thump
. An epic length of time later, the second beat:
Thump
. Ry fell asleep counting the seconds between the beats and wondering what kind of animal could live with such sluggish blood.

After the first night of this new abuse, his mother was never the same. Ry heard her make a call to Mrs. Horvath, saying she was so sorry but didn’t have time to fix up that blouse after all, could she suggest the stitchery in Bloughton? Soon he began to notice shiners expanding from her elbows and anklebones. Her body would seize up in the midst of odd
movements—lifting a jug of milk from the fridge or turning the faucet to the left. She still smiled at her son in a way that insisted it was nothing, only now her own eyes didn’t believe it.

It was a surprise when he found her sitting on her bed one day working the handle of the bat with a square of sandpaper. He asked her why. He didn’t know any better. When she looked up her eyes were pouched in soft purple tissue, and she winced while making the smallest of turns in his direction, as if there were things inside her that had been hurt. She smiled and told him she wanted the bat to stay pretty—or maybe handsome was a better word for a baseball bat; pretty was a girl’s word. He stood there in the doorway as she kept on about how it had been Ry’s bat first, and that it was still his bat secretly, and that one day he would get it back, just wait and see—but shhh, wait quietly. Ry didn’t know what to say. She kept talking and sanding and crying.

The end came on a January weekend. They were inside, the entire family, because it was a night cruel with snow and armed with wind like slapping hands. Things were nevertheless going well: Calves bedraggled by some mysterious ailment were making a spirited recovery. Marvin leaned back in the living room rocking chair and hummed his satisfaction:
Hmmmm hm hm hmmmm
. Mom prepared food in the kitchen, Ry and Sarah played on the living room floor, and there was peace on Earth, at least until the humming stopped.

Ry glanced over from where he sat scrunched on an ottoman, pretending the floor around him was a river of lava. Marvin’s rocking chair lurched, empty. He was up and moving. The blue TV glow slid off his shaved skull as he swept into the dining room. Ry leaned over the lava to watch. His
father reached beneath a correspondence desk and removed a small, folded pile of fabric that Ry had never seen before. Because of the dimness and distance Ry couldn’t be sure, but he thought Marvin put the material to his face and inhaled deeply before adjusting his glasses and thumbing through his mustache bristles. Ry leaned farther and his knees sunk into molten rock. Marvin carefully folded the fabric—it was pink, Ry could see that much—before stuffing it into his pants pocket. Not a word was said. Minutes later, the family sat down to dinner.

Ry slept well that night. He would never forgive himself for that.

Eight hours later he got dressed and went outside while shaking off bad dreams about the new kinds of noises coming from the bedroom above. January, after all, was a month that always made the house squeal and moan. He went through the motions of early-morning chores trying to move as little as possible. His knees, brutalized by glaciated dirt, slowed his trip back to the house, or at least, he told himself it was his knees. He dallied for so long that eventually Marvin emerged from the house and passed him on the way to the garage, face obscured inside a white hood of exhalation, his gloved fingers pawing through a key ring.

“Your mom’s sick.” It was a grunt from behind a coat collar. “Don’t pester her.”

Ry turned on his heel. “I heard her—” he began, but Marvin was already stamping the snow from his boots at the garage entryway, then slamming the door behind him. Ry paused to hear the truck engine shudder off its armor of frost before lowering his face against the cold and heading indoors.

It wasn’t until he was shivering in the kitchen that he
came up against the reality of no breakfast. Marvin was gone; his mother was sick. He heard movement above but knew by its aimlessness that it was Sarah. He shucked his coat and boots and went upstairs. Sarah had only recently been given her own bed, and already this morning she had abandoned it. She sat near the window groping at toys. Watching her fumble with brightly colored plastic always rankled him. He had his own toys, army figures and superheroes and race cars, but Marvin had made it clear that such trinkets were not for the heirs to mighty farms.

Plenty of toys remained, though, and lived in a wilted cardboard box printed with the words “Corn Flakes” and crammed into the space beneath his bed. Sometimes, if he knew Marvin was far out of range, Ry would take out the box and pour the contents onto his bedspread. He would sift through the characters, pair them off for unfought duels, and bask in their million tiny facets. Soon they would seem to be as big and as real as he was. Ry had been jealous of his sister’s happy banging, but that was the wrong approach. Forget chores. Forget meals. Forget his mother. They could bang toys together until the snowy world outside faded to absolute white.

It was a fantasy interrupted by the blank gaze of his parents’ bedroom door. Ry held his breath, leaned in, and listened. Sarah’s clatter made it hard to hear. He closed his eyes and let his warm ear seal against the cool walnut. There—he heard a tentative bedspring. Somehow relieved, he retreated, picked up Sarah, and carried her downstairs.

They ate cereal. Ry had to wring the milk out of her shirt. Next, there was a special stool for washing hands and on the sink there was animal-shaped soap. Traumatized by an
improper ratio of hot to cold, she barely noticed as he dressed her in coat, hat, snow pants, and boots. She held on to him with a mittened hand and together they took a thousand toddler-sized steps to the dairy barn. When those chores were completed, they cut across the center of the property toward the chicken house, but made a pit stop in the garage to feed Sniggety. The dog, still curious back then, left a wet nose-trail across the girl’s face. This dismayed her and she tried to air her grievance. Ry pretended to listen but was distracted by the space in the garage where the truck used to be. Marvin Burke had mentioned nothing the day before about going into town. For that matter, Jo Beth Burke had shown no signs of illness. Everything felt wrong.

Soon it was one in the afternoon. Ry felt a flash of annoyance at his mother. Never, not even during the worst bouts of illness, had she failed to fix them food. Her desertion was profane and left him with no choice. Ry’s gut was hot and the stairway banister, when he took it, was cold. Once at the unhelpful bedroom door, though, his indignation dissolved.

“Mom?” It was too soft. He cleared his throat and raised the volume. “Mom, you okay?”

He pressed his ear to the wood. Icy air howled through some breach in the defenses. Downstairs, Sarah was yielding to the dull drone of a resolute cry. There was a consistency to these noises that had the texture of sleep; his mother would never know if he snuck in, stole a quick peek. He put his hand to the brass knob and was surprised by his varnish of sweat.

“Honey.” It was his mother’s voice. He stopped turning the knob and it clattered back to a neutral position. “Honey, is that you?”

Ry’s heart was pounding. This conversation went right in
the face of Marvin’s warning. If they were caught, he knew full well that his mother would get the brunt of the punishment, and that itself was punishing. He spoke quickly. “I wanted to know if you felt better.”

“No.” The response was instant. “No, dear, leave me alone. Is that Sarah I hear? Is she all right?”

“She’s fine. I was thinking of making lunch.”

“That’s a good idea. You do that. Don’t worry about me. You just let me rest and feel better.”

Ry did not move. She sounded like she was holding her breath.

“You want me to bring you soup?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Did you feed the chickens? You better do that.”

“I already did. You need some water?”

“And what about the cows?”

“I did them before Dad left.”

There was a pause.

“I have water,” she said. “Plenty of water. Now go take care of your sister. You left your comic books in front of the TV. Go read your comic books.”

The bedsprings creaked. He thought he heard a gasp.

“You don’t sound sick.” This was bold. He clamped his teeth.

“Well, I am.” Her voice carried equal parts disorientation and anger. “I
am
sick. I am
very
sick. What else do you want me to say?”

That he hit you again. That he used the bat. That it’s not a virus that’s keeping you hidden but a bruise or welt or something so bad you won’t let your children see it. Say that, any of it, and the door will open and we can deal with it, you and
me; we’ll figure out a way, even if he comes home and finds us—somehow we will deal with it.

“Now you go look after your sister and let me rest.”

He was ten years old and always did what he was told.

It was just this once that he disobeyed.

He seized the knob and cranked it. It would not open. He wrenched it harder.

“Ry, no! No, honey! I’m fine! I’m fine!”

Not once in his life had he found a door in the house locked. The old house had keyholes everywhere, but Ry had never suspected the existence of actual keys. He stood and kicked at the door, at the knob, the jamb, the hinges. He slammed his palms against the wood. Nothing gave way.

“Stop! Ry, please! Just stop!”

But he was already running, downstairs in moments, through the house in seconds, her protests fading. He hopped into his boots but did not lace them; he hurled on his coat but did not zip it. As he threw open the back door he heard the softening of his sister’s cries as she grew sleepy. With any luck she would doze through the whole thing.

His parents’ bedroom window was above the back porch. Ry tried to think of it, with its siding and sills and rain gutters, as just another tree to be climbed. Once he found himself standing upon the roof’s sparkling shingles, he took a quick inventory of the nests of snow, the runners of ice. He moved swiftly, stretching his torso over the edge of the roof, reaching out for the storm window that was now at shoulder level, and putting his hands to the pane. It was unexpectedly hot. He dug his nails under the sash and lifted. It opened cleanly for the very last time.

Ry pushed himself up and over the windowsill. This angle
of approach did not allow him to prepare for the various waiting impediments: the rapier of a radio antenna; the rocking chair and its long teeth; and the red bat, which clattered to the floor and sketched a territorial arc. Ry shook off the traps like Sniggety emerging from a rain-beaded crop and rolled away, gaining balance against the dresser.

She was too ashamed to look at him—that was his first thought. She lay on her left side facing the far wall, a thin sheet draped over her body. His second thought was that it was too cold for such a measly covering; he couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t burrowed beneath a few blankets. He began compassing the foot of the bed.

Wadded near the headboard was the pink fabric, the one his father had stolen from the dining room the night before. Another step closer brought a new detail into focus: It was bloody. Not soaked, just spotted, as if it had been used to stem the welling of minor nicks. Ry realized that the fabric was another sewing commission. How could she have been so stupid? He did not feel the rest of the steps it took to bring him to the far side of the bed. The sheet, when he lifted it from his mother’s torso, had no texture or weight—it was as if he were shooing away smoke. His mother’s naked body was a surprise, though not fundamentally disturbing; she was, after all, in the privacy of her own bed. Nothing appeared to be wrong, and Ry leaned over to whisper apologies.

Her ear was sewn to the bed. It was an amateur job, though Ry could imagine Marvin insisting, as he laced the brown thread in and out of the cartilage, that that was the whole point—it didn’t take a genius to sew. Jo Beth made an attempt to look at her son, but even the slightest move tautened the ear. One of the four loops of thread had already
snapped; the others proved that Marvin Burke at least knew his knots. Ry lifted an arm to offer some kind of assistance and his mother winced. He winced back. With fingers as clumsy as his, she was sure to emerge from the ordeal slotted. Frustration splintered into impatience. She was the one with dexterous fingers.
Use your hands
, he thought.
Can’t you just use your hands?