We Were the Mulvaneys (6 page)

M
ike Mulvaney Jr. was a senior at Mt. Ephraim and he was on the football team and some of his buddies were involved with the girl but he had not been involved. “Mule” heard all about it, for sure. But he had not been involved.

What can you expect of a girl like that. That kind of a girl. Her mother, her sisters. County welfare. Runs in the family.

What the Mt. Ephraim guys did after the last game of the season. Three or four guys on the team and some older guys who'd graduated the year before. Sure, they were all friends of Mike Mulvaney's but Mike Mulvaney had not been one of them, that night.

Getting a retarded girl drunk. Doing—you know, things—to her.

Hey: she isn't retarded. Who says that?

The whole family, the Duncans—the mother's an alcoholic, she's got Indian blood. Comes from the Seneca reservation.

That's not what I heard. I heard they're—you know, Negro.

Well it's all the same. That kind of people. At that—what d'you call it—trailer court—

Trailer village. On the Haggartsville Road.

Mule knew all about it, or maybe just a little about it. Guys exaggerate. They were all drunk. In the Mt. Ephraim Cemetery—wild! You can't believe everything you hear. Della Rae Duncan went out with all kinds of guys including guys in their twenties, and older. Or it was her sister, or one of her sisters—the one with the baby.
Baby pitch-black as tar. No, that's the one that died. Wasn't it a hole in the heart?

On Monday morning we began to hear of it. First on the school bus, then at school. Nobody knew exactly. None of the younger kids knew. Their older brothers wouldn't tell and it wasn't clear if their older sisters knew: they'd frown, look away. There was the exciting promise
something had happened
which was a still more exciting promise
somebody's going to get into trouble.
Either Della Rae Duncan had had something happen to her or she was going to get into trouble or both.

Della Rae was one of the big girls on the bus. Fifteen years old and still in ninth grade. She wasn't in special ed like a cousin of hers, a tall hulking boy with a harelip. Some of us believed she'd started off in special ed, in seventh grade possibly, but she was in regular ninth-grade classes now.

Della Rae was a
dirty girl
we'd hear. It was just something you knew. There were certain
dirty girls
and Della Rae Duncan was one of them. Some of us thought that Della Rae was a
dirty girl
because her skin was dirty, and her clothes. Her skin looked stained, like wood. She was a short heavyset girl with sizable breasts. A bulldog face. Large thick-lidded eyes and a snaky scar on her swollen upper lip. She was almost nice-looking except she was ugly. She was shy except for her quick temper. She wore boys' jeans and a khaki jacket every day through the winter and she smelled of woodsmoke and underarms. She smelled of the inside of a trailer that doesn't get aired. Her hair was stiff with grease and fitted like a cap over her head, not like normal hair we thought. You could see it was black hair yet it didn't look black exactly, more like it was coated with a thin film of dust.

Della Rae wasn't waiting for the school bus with the other kids at the trailer village, Monday morning. Nor Tuesday. Nor Wednesday. Thursday she was back again, same bulldog face. Dark-stained skin. Puffy-lidded eyes. That pea-colored jacket with a drawstring hood that looked like it'd been used to wipe hands on. Della Rae stared through us making her way to the back of the bus where she sat with another girl they said was part Indian or possibly part Negro. Or both.

At the senior high there was talk, but only in secret. Whispering, sniggering. Guys told one another in the lavatories or at their lockers, heads bent, faces creasing in amazement, lewd grins. There was much laughter. There were expressions of incredulity.
How many? How long? When?
The girls, of course, knew nothing about it. Especially the nice girls knew nothing about it. They did not want to know for just to know of
certain things
was to be sullied by the knowledge. It was possible to pray sincerely and passionately for an afflicted person (like Della Rae Duncan) to be aided by Jesus Christ without knowing exactly why.

Maybe, in fact, it was better not to know why? You could feel sorry for that person, and generous. You didn't shrink away in disgust.

 

A year or so before, an older brother of Della Rae Duncan's was reported killed in Vietnam. His name would eventually be engraved, with other “casualties” from Mt. Ephraim, on a granite marker in front of the post office.

His name was Dwight David Duncan and he was a private first class in the United States Army, twenty years old at the time of his death. Since dropping out of high school he'd worked for Mulvaney Roofing. When his picture appeared on the front page of the
Mt. Ephraim Patriot-Ledger
, Dad exclaimed, “Son of a bitch! Dwight Duncan! Poor kid.”

We gathered around to stare at the picture and read the columns of print. Dwight David Duncan was no one we knew, but the fact that Dad knew him, and was so upset, seemed to bring him into the house with us; into the kitchen, where even the dogs moved about uncertainly, worriedly. Private First Class Duncan was a burly, swarthy-skinned boy with heavy-lidded eyes like Della Rae's and lank, straight, Indian-seeming hair. He'd been photographed in his dress uniform, his cap tilted back rakishly on his head; a cigarette slanted from his mouth. Dad was saying what a good, hardworking kid, very quiet, not too bright maybe but able to follow orders with no questions asked, and no complaints. “God spare us, Mikey-Junior never gets called,” Dad said, sighing. There was a pause, and he added, as always when he was on this subject, “Still, the war needs to be fought.”

This was like tossing a lighted match into a can of gasoline.

Mom said, “
Why
does it need to be fought?”

Dad said, “Darling, we've been through this already.”

Mom said, “Yes, but you never change your mind!”

Dad said, calmly, with a wink at us kids, “Well,
you
never change your mind.”

By this time Mom would be pacing about, arms flailing, eyes hot with anguish. If there were cats in the kitchen they'd rush out, ears laid back. If Little Boots was present, the most anxious of the dogs, he'd dance about clicking his toenails on the linoleum floor and whimpering up into his mistress's and master's faces, vivid to him as balloon faces. Mom who'd given impromptu, stammering speeches on the subject to relatives, at prayer meetings, at the P.T.A. and in the A & P, would choke back sobs of frustration, saying that the war in Vietnam had to stop, the killing had to stop on both sides, what a terrible thing, what a tragedy. Tearing the country apart! Turning fathers against sons! It was like the 1850s when the Fugitive Slave Act tore the country apart and led to the Civil War and almost four hundred thousand deaths, such a cruel, inhuman, ignorant piece of legislation, and now in enlightened times wouldn't you think our leaders would have learned from the past? “First Kennedy, then Johnson, and now Nixon!” Mom cried. “What we need to save us is a true Christian leader, before it's too late.”

“Yes,” said Dad, “—but the fact remains, the war needs to be fought.”

“No, no it doesn't! You're wrong!”

“Because the Communists have to be stopped, pure and simple,” Dad said. He spoke quietly, stubbornly. His broad handsome face glistened, his curly hair caught the overhead light with a glisten too of oil, the color of wood shavings. He was not a tall man but he was a solid, foursquare man, a man of presence, gravity. You knew that, if you pushed hard against his chest, he would stand firm, unyielding. “—Just like the Nazis, maybe worse. Twenty million men, women and children killed by Stalin and his henchmen! Even more millions killed by ‘Chairman Mao' and his henchmen! No, darling, the war can't stop until we push the bastards back, and even if a son of mine has to put on a uniform and fight—”

“What! What are you saying?—”

“—or, God forbid, two sons—”

“Two sons! Michael Mulvaney, are you crazy!”

“—
it has to be fought.
Pure and simple.”

Sometimes Mom would stalk out of the house, and go into a barn for the solace, as she put it, of dumb animals; sometimes Dad would stalk out, to smoke a cigarette in the open air; or Little Boots would get so excited he'd have to be placated by both Mom and Dad; or, suddenly, Feathers would begin to shriek, and everyone would turn to his cage in astonishment that so tiny a creature, smaller than the smallest of our hands, could cause such a ruckus.

Of the Mulvaney boys, Mike Jr. was the patriot (though he confessed he “sure as hell” hoped he wasn't drafted into the army, come graduation) and Patrick was the dissident—of course. Though only fourteen at this time, a weedy-lanky boy with a cracking voice, Patrick was an admirer of the war-protesting Berrigan priest-brothers and warned he'd run away to Canada as a conscientious objector if necessary. Dad said ominously we'd see about that if the time ever came, God forbid! Mom wrung her hands saying you see, you see!—the war is tearing American families apart! Patrick, incensed, had a habit of pushing his glasses against the bridge of his nose as if he hoped they'd break, declaring he was a pacifist, he'd been reading Thoreau's “Civil Disobedience,” he could not shed blood, not even animal blood let alone human blood, and no mere earthly political power could change
that.

It was strange, though: Mike and Patrick never quarreled with each other on this issue. Patrick shrank from confronting his big brother (in fact, bigger than Patrick by about twenty-five pounds) and Mike seemed mainly amused by Patrick, regardless of what impassioned words issued from his mouth. Mike just wasn't one for debating abstract issues. (“BS-ing” he called it.) Just laughed and shrugged his muscular shoulders, a mannerism of Dad's that meant
Hell, live and let live.
In this case,
Fight and let fight.
His philosophy was the trustworthy team player's: you do what your buddies are doing, and you don't let them down.

Marianne, flush-faced like Mom, but by instinct the peacemaker in the family, said she hated war, any war, and prayed the Vietnam War would end soon, and all wars would end, forever. And then no one would be mad at anyone else, ever again.

Judd who was eight years old kept his thoughts to himself. He hoped to join the Air Force as soon as he was old enough, and be a bomber pilot.

Private First Class Dwight David Duncan's picture from the
Mt. Ephraim Patriot-Ledger
was carefully clipped out and tacked to the kitchen bulletin board, where it prevailed for months, a smiling and not accusing presence, until, eventually, it was covered over by newer clippings, Polaroid snapshots, Mom's
FAMILY CALENDAR
, pages of brilliant color from Burpee's seed catalogue.

 

Mike “Mule” Mulvaney, a fullback on the championship Mt. Ephraim football team for the '71–'72 season, had been with some of his teammates that night, but not the guys who did it.

Whatever it was, exactly, they did. With Della Rae Duncan. Or to her.

If you could believe half the wild tales making the rounds! You know how guys exaggerate.

Guys who weren't even there, for Christ's sake.

That night following the game, and the big celebration party, Mike didn't have a car. He was with his buddies Frankie Kreigner, Brock Johnson, some others. Jammed into Frankie's dad's Cadillac and it was true some of the guys were drinking, passing cans of beer to one another, and also a flask of vodka, and somebody's dad's Wild Turkey. So maybe the boys were violating the law, drinking in a moving motor vehicle, but only technically. Nobody was actually drunk, anyway not Mule Mulvaney, not much. Nor Frankie, who was driving.

Mule could be a rough guy sometimes, a tough customer on the football field (you don't get baptized “Mule” by coach, for nothing) but his rep was that of a helluva nice guy. Not mean. Sure he'd hit you square in the solar plexus with his shoulder and lift you off your feet like a cartoon character too astonished to register surprise before you landed, hard, on your ass, but it wasn't to
hurt
, like some guys, it was more to—well,
impress.
So you'd know that he meant business. So you'd respect him. And stay out of his way next time, if you could.

And he was the kind to help you up off the ground afterward, clamp a hand on your shoulder saying
Good play! nice try!

The most popular guy on the team, practically. One of the best-looking.

A decent guy, and even, if you knew him better, a Christian—sort of. His mother Corinne Mulvaney was a devout churchgoer, at this time a member of the South Lebanon United Methodist congregation. Mule went less and less frequently with her and the others to church services now he was older, but still it rubs off on you. You have to know deep in your heart
Do unto others as you would they would do unto you
is just plain common sense. So he was beginning to get a little scared. Not seriously scared, but a little. Mixing warm Molson with vodka and whiskey didn't help. After the big party at the MacIntyres' (this really cool ranch-style house on the golf course) they'd piled into cars and driven six miles out to the funky County Line Tavern, where there was the possibility, unwarranted as it turned out, of some after-hours drinking, and some “girls.” Then word got out that T-T MacIntyre had picked up Della Rae Duncan, the poor bitch was dumb enough and drunk enough to imagine he “liked” her and wanted to be her “steady.” They were in Jamie Klinger's van, this gang of guys. Cruising Route 119 as far south as the river, then turning back to Mt. Ephraim. Cruising Main Street, where (it's after 2
A.M.
) everything is dead—the Majestic, the Checkerboard Diner. Then into the cemetery off Iroquois. Which was where Frankie Kreigner trailed them. Though not turning into the cemetery but circling the block. Mule Mulvaney was saying, “Maybe we should check them out?—they might be hurting her, or something.” Another time he said, like pleading, “Shit, Della Rae, that poor mutt, that's like shooting fish in a barrel.” The other guys were divided. Maybe yes, maybe no. There was something exciting about this. Knowing Della Rae was putting out for their buddies, or anyway guessing so. Though they didn't want to investigate, exactly. Della Rae was a pig and she was smashed out of her skull and you didn't want to think about it, Mule felt blood rush into his cock like a faucet turned on: hot.