Wonderland (10 page)

His grandfather might have seen him cry, but he said nothing.

That evening Mrs. Brennan stopped by to visit him. She was in town for Friday-evening shopping and she wore a dressy coat, black with a maroon suede collar, with large rhinestone buttons. Her face was coarse and reddened, as if with permanent embarrassment. She
held her large patent-leather pocketbook on her lap. Inside her thick brown stockings her legs were beefy, strong; she sat with her coat pulled tight across her lap, primly, her eyes darting shyly about the ward as if she had no business looking at anyone except Jesse.

It’s funny how all these beds are together, people sleeping in a row like this
, she said.
I never been in a hospital myself. Had all the kids at home, there wasn’t any trouble.… Oh, Matt said to ask you are they feeding you right?

Jesse hoped none of the nurses could hear.
Yes
, he said.

You get enough milk? Eggs every day? Is the butter fresh?

Yes
.

Jesse’s smile was wobbly.

Well …

Her face went slack with a bleak, dumb worry. What to say to him? A neighbor boy. Just a boy who lived next door to her and her own family, no kin of hers, not even a boy she knew very well. She didn’t know any of the Hartes well. If he wouldn’t talk about food, what was there to talk about? Jesse could understand her uneasiness. But he could not think of anything to say to her. If only she would go away.… But when she shifted the pocketbook on her knees he was startled, thinking she was about to leave him.

Jesse, you know if you ever need … if …
Her gaze dropped in sorrow. She was a large, clumsy woman, built in the shoulders like a man, her graying, frizzy hair short and shapeless about her face. Her skin was prematurely creased from the sun and tiny veins had worked their way to the surface of her nose and cheeks, giving her a flushed look.
If you ever need anybody to take you in …

Jesse remembered her screams that night:
It’s the Harte boy, somebody shot him!

Her voice now was not a scream but an ordinary voice, floating on a shapeless, dark space within him, a fluid space that shimmered and tilted when he moved. He adjusted his perspiring body in the bed. His body was private and warm and agitated, but the bed was public. It belonged to no one. With part of his mind he could hear her voice—she fumbled on, talking now of their sick cows, of how lucky Matt was to sell the farm the way he did, how everything needed fixing, how they were going to move in a few weeks; and here he sensed her hesitating, her wondering if she should say how lucky Jesse was that they
hadn’t moved yet—And with another part of his mind he could hear that other voice, that terrible muscular yell of hers:
Get the car started! Get it going fast!

They saved his life.

We heard about your grandpa going to take care of you
, she said,
that’s real nice.… A man his age shouldn’t live alone anyway. But if you ever need help or a place to live …

Jesse could not look at her. The Brennans had nothing of their own; Matt Brennan had had to sell his farm, and yet she was offering him … offering him what? A home? A chance to be a son again? The Brennans had five children of their own. They were very poor. And yet she was offering to take him in.

He was relieved when she stood to leave. She had waited until visiting hours were over, as if leaving before the very end would have hurt Jesse’s feelings.
Here are some things, just some … I don’t know if you want any … just some brownies and …
She spoke apologetically, her face reddening. She handed him a box and Jesse thanked her.

Well! One thing I’ll tell them is that they feed you all right in here. Matt was real curious about that!

Jesse smiled good-by. Good-by. When she left, his warm face turned pale.

He hoped he would never see her again.

He was discharged from the hospital the following week. His grandfather came to get him in a pickup truck, which rattled and bounced because it was empty in back except for some straw. From time to time the old man made a sharp noise with his throat and nose, a
tsk
ing noise that made Jesse glance at him. But he was not conscious of what he was doing. He leaned up close against the steering wheel, squinting peevishly; finally he said, “What’s that say? Why’s that so big over there?”

It was a large white sign advertising automobiles.

“Just to sell cars,” Jesse said.

“What?”

“A sign to sell cars.”

Jesse’s grandfather shook his head angrily. He did not understand what the billboard meant, why it was there. He seemed irritated by it and by the other signs along the highway. They were just leaving
Yewville and there were many things to see, a confusion of signs and houses and traffic. It was a Saturday afternoon; farmers and their families were driving in to town. Jesse stared at the cars that passed by, dreading a familiar face—someone he might know from school—he dreaded faces turning in surprise at the sight of him, fingers pointing toward him. He held himself still, his arms folded and pressed against his ribs as if he were conscious of the gift of himself, the gift of being here, living. He would never forget. He listened for the beating of his heart, remembering Dr. Farley’s swift professional concern for that heart: it was saying gently
Here I am, I am here, I am beating
. So he would not be frightened at the thought of seeing someone he knew. That would happen, eventually. Fingers would be pointed at him. Eventually.

Mrs. Brennan had held him in her arms on the drive in … the bouncing drive in, through a snowstorm … held him in her arms as he bled onto her
.…

He narrowed his eyes sharply to stop this thinking. He would not think about it. His grandfather was muttering something about Yewville, about all these people making fools of themselves buying things and hanging around on the streets, the kids running loose, the women dressed up as if for parties, the men piling up debts at Montgomery Ward’s for things they didn’t need, and when Jesse opened his eyes again they were out in the country. Safe. The air here was cold and sunny. Fields were stubbled with snow; everything was raw and frozen hard, the ditches jagged with ice. Jesse belonged in the country, like his grandfather. The hardness of the sky, the hardness of the flat earth matched something in himself.

Getting to his grandfather’s farm was like sleepwalking: you drove in one direction and then turned and drove in another, as if by instinct, groping in a dream, turning from one narrow dirt road to another road more narrow, until the last road was hardly more than a cow lane leading back into the wilderness. Tall cattails stuck up out of the ice in the ditches in stiff, frigid clusters. Everything was silent here—no other cars or trucks, only a few homes far back from the road, looking vacant. No telephone poles this far into the country, no electricity at all. Distance. Silence. Something began to throb in Jesse, deeply and heavily, this thought of their being so far away from the town and from his old home, from what he could remember of himself … out here every-thing
would become flattened by the brutal sweep of the land, the wind, neutralized by distance.

He would forget.

The drive had made his shoulder ache, but he held himself tight, carefully. His grandfather had fallen into a sullen silence, as if he were alone, and Jesse was grateful for his silence, watching the fields blotted out by woods and the woods falling back to open fields again, a rhythm of fields and woods and fields that was peaceful, hypnotic. Yes, he would forget; he would be lost in all this distance, this wilderness, the electric nervousness of his own soul neutralized by the silence of this old man and the land he lived on.

He had bled all over Mrs. Brennan
.…

The fields opened and closed; the woods opened and closed. It was silent out there as if uncreated, unimagined. Except for the road itself, you would not suppose that anyone had been this way before. The winter fields looked crushed and obliterated, a jumble of ancient cornstalks, the irrigation ruts hard as iron, lined with jagged hunks of ice that gleamed hotly in the sun. An inhuman landscape. A healing landscape.
Wheeled in the emergency ward … skimming along the floor on a creaking cart … the smell of rubber and metal and gas … the pumping of his heart, pumping blood out of him in gulping surges
.… Now his grandfather drove the old truck slowly, but still it lurched in the road’s potholes and ruts, making Jesse’s wound ache. He said nothing. Once the old man glanced at him, as if just remembering him. “Your shoulder acting up?” he said.

Jesse shook his head
no
.

Almost there. He remembered the turn in the road. And now he saw the old farmhouse that would be his home—half a mile back from the road, at the end of a lane that led through two cow fields. No mailbox out front. Great oak trees lining the lane. The farmhouse itself was a surprise to Jesse, who had remembered it as being much larger. It was unpainted and its wood looked very dark, very damp, as if sour. He had the idea it would smell sour. It had originally been a small cabin, but other rooms had been added onto it over the years, so that now it had an uneven, unbalanced, lopsided appearance, as if its various parts had been jammed together by hand. Down a slight incline from the house was the outhouse, made of the same dark, unpainted wood. The door
was ajar. The lightning rod on the peak of the house roof looked thin as a straw, a needle.
I don’t want to live here
, Jesse thought in a panic. It was very cold. Bitter cold. His heart pounded wildly, as if to warm his blood against this cold.

His grandfather seemed about to say something, then thought better of it. Jesse said feebly, “Here we are.…” and was startled at the childlike sound of his voice. He stared at the house and the barns. Why did everything look so uncreated, so mean? Though the air was sunny, this place had the appearance of being in shadow, as if it were the underworld somehow, the bottom part of the real world, reflected in a substance like water.
Would he have to live here?
When his mother had brought them out to visit, long ago, the farm had looked larger, it had looked different.… Maybe it looked bad now because of the time of year. Their mother had brought them out in the summer; the air had been fresh and welcoming. The big hay barn had not looked so ugly and rotted. Jesse stared at the smaller barns, the dilapidated corn crib, the chicken coop, the pump on its concrete base, with its handle still up in the air, as if the old man, hearing the news, had flung the handle up and run.…

A sudden barking. A dog’s yipping. Duke came running out of the woodshed, crouched low to the ground. His body shook as if with a convulsive terror. His ears were laid back close to his bony head.

“Duke!” Jesse cried. “Hey, you Duke! Hey!”

His dog froze, as if not recognizing him at first. Then he ran to Jesse, barking loudly. His body swayed with the violent motions of his tail.

“Hey, you crazy dog, don’t you know me?” Jesse squatted and embraced Duke. He pressed his face against the dog’s cold fur. “It’s all right, it’s okay, I’m back now … it’s okay.…” Squatting, Jesse watched his grandfather approach him and tried to interpret the old man’s sorrowing, closed-up look. Grandfather Vogel wore black, an old black suit. Behind him the farm buildings he had put up shared that black; the snow was a painful glaring white, but beneath it was black, a black substance. Trees and bushes were black but ornately covered with white, their skeletons decorated with a fine hard white. It was a sight that transfixed Jesse. The dog’s wriggling in his arms brought him back to life.

Stooping slowly, with little enthusiasm, Jesse’s grandfather patted Duke’s head. “He’s gun-shy now,” he said.

Jesse nodded.

Jesse got his suitcase from the truck and followed his grandfather to the house. He had to push the dog gently down from him; Duke was on his hind legs, pawing Jesse’s chest. He yipped hysterically.
What if the bleeding starts again?
Jesse thought weakly. It was such a struggle even to hold the dog. But he carried his own suitcase to the house. The kitchen was cold, unheated. His grandfather had evidently gone off that morning without heating it, to save fuel. Now he lit a fire in the big iron stove, grunting as he bent. Jesse looked around at the walls, which were just boards, and the wooden table in the middle of the room, and the tin sink with its short-handled pump. He was careful to show no disappointment. When the fire was started, Jesse’s grandfather went into the next room and shut the door. Probably going to change his clothes, Jesse thought.
But what do I do now? What now?
The few times his mother had brought him and Jean and Shirley and Bob to the farm, the old man had kept at a distance from them; it was their grandmother who liked them, loved them, fussed over them. But she had died three years ago. The old man had always been out in the fields, working. Only happy when working, they said of him. He worked the whole section without hired help, except at harvesttime, using two teams of horses—one for the morning, one for the afternoon. Jesse and the girls had run out to spy on their crabby old grandfather, giggling, and there he would be, half a mile away, behind his team of horses, plowing, endlessly plowing, absolutely alone, a bony-faced old man with a filthy straw hat drooping about his face, his shoulders rounded inside his overalls. They had stopped giggling when they saw him. He moved in absolute silence, alone, a kind of nullity in the midst of the green corn, moving as if in a trance or a dream, making their eyes film over with the starkness of his isolation and his indifference … how unlike their own father he was, to be so lonely, to move so slowly behind a team of plodding horses! Their own father needed talk, laughter, beer, speed, noise, other men, other people to complete himself.…

I’ll work like hell for you
, Jesse thought.
I’ll show you
.