Songs in Ordinary Time (6 page)

First it was only a crust of bread and a glass of water for which he would beg. And then as he picked crumbs from his soiled lapel and laid them on his tongue and saw her quick eyes flinch between his and that last chop, the son’s, on the split platter, he quickly thanked her for her goodness and edged toward the door, knowing as he moved how soon that bone would be gnawed clean of its meat and fat and gristle; and then as he placed two grateful quarters on the table and saw her long neck stiffen with the refusal of stubborn pride, he saw how easy the next request would be, the ride to the bus depot; and then the ride back here after his mock shame at the ticket window to find his pockets empty; and the next, even easier, not even voiced, as he fluffed and set the pillow on the pallet of blankets she carried to the garage, passing them through, her eyes averted as shyly as if she stood outside his bedroom door.

24 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

Then, as he settled himself with a weary sigh, on the edge of sleep, he remembered how queerly her younger son had watched him, his grave eyes alert, until he had laid aside the gleaned bone and begun his tale, and then the relief easing the boy’s frown. It was as if the boy needed the tale told and needed it told right; as if he knew it all as well as any rhyme, and in the telling would have every word and rhythm right. Had the boy’s lips actually moved with his? Duvall wondered. Or had his rapt gaze only made it seem so?

“I am Omar Duvall, this morning a peddler through these emerald mountains. And tonight a helpless beggar, first disgraced and then plundered by a sorry band of black-hearted strangers who, out of the kindness of my Christian soul, I took on board and tried to help with their magazine selling while I did mine….” His eyes scanned the messy countertops. “Household utensils!” he cried, seizing a wire whisk clotted with butterscotch pudding. “Eggbeaters and spatulas and can openers and these.”

He smiled, reverently touching a slotted spoon. “These humble kitchen tools, these nuts and bolts of the family, of the heart, in a manner of speaking.”

And as he spoke, it had come to him, as it did now and would later with the day’s first light sifting through the rotting roof, that here he might finally be safe.

The older boy might be a problem. He had come from his bedroom into the kitchen, and when he saw his dinner eaten, and in his place at the table, at the head of the table opposite his mother, a stranger, a male stranger, his lip had curled and instinctively his fists had clenched. “What the…”

“Norm, this is Mr. Duvall,” Marie said, her cheeks bright.

“Omar,” Duvall corrected, extending his hand; but the boy turned to his mother, demanding to know what was left for him to eat.

“Cereal,” she said. “Or some toast,” she added absently, looking back to Duvall. “Where are you from?” she asked.

“From everywhere,” he said. “But lately,” and he spoke sadly for it had become the truth, “from nowhere.”

T
he fragrance of lilacs filled the kitchen. Benjy stared at the cornflakes box as he chewed.

“Good morning, sunshine!” the radio announcer called and Benjy winced.

He dreaded going to school today and facing the boys who’d seen his father hit him yesterday.

“It’s now eight-oh-five in the valley. Outside our studio on State Street, the temperature is sixty degrees and rising by the minute! It looks like the coldest, wettest spring on record is finally over, thanks to the high pressure that’s moving rapidly up from the south. It looks like summer’s finally on her way!”

The little house began to tremble with vibrating pipes and an outburst of cranky voices. Norm had to get into the bathroom to brush his teeth, but SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 25

Alice was still in there. His mother hollered from the top of the stairs for Alice to give Norm his toothbrush. She slid it under the door.

“Now there’s crud all over my toothbrush!” Norm complained.

“Better than crud all over your teeth,” Alice yelled from the bathroom.

The telephone was ringing.

“I got it!” Norm hollered.

“If it’s your father, I’m not here,” Marie yelled down.

Benjy’s eyes never left the box as he chewed. He hadn’t told his mother about meeting his father. He never told her bad things. The news was on the radio. “Woodstock police warn that a group of door-to-door con artists were last seen…” The radio sputtered with static. Behind Benjy, the washing machine gurgled as it changed cycles. Now it began to suck and pump out its wash water. The floor vibrated and the lilacs trembled on the table and the cereal box teetered back and forth, so that Benjy had to hold on to it as he ate. The shaking stopped as the machine began to fill with water.

“Benjy, pour the bleach in,” his mother yelled on her way downstairs.

He got up and added the bleach, then slammed the lid down when he saw his sister’s bloodstained underpants. He sat back down and blinked at the cornflakes box, waiting for his mother’s attack.

“And this just in,” the radio announcer said excitedly. “Last night the newly planted grass in the town park was torn to shreds by a pack of unidentified hoodlums who drove their cars and motorcycles up and down the paths. Department of Public Works head, Alderman Jarden Greene, assures us that most of the damage will be repaired in time for the season’s first band concert. Greene also says that as bandmaster he will not tolerate any of the hooliganism that spoiled last year’s…”

From the other room came a tattoo of hollow thumps as his mother banged on the bathroom door. “What the hell are you doing in there?” she demanded. “I can’t be late again.” At the sound of her footsteps, Benjy closed his eyes, but she ran back upstairs.

“Out of respect for one of its oldest members, tonight’s town council meeting has been postponed. Funeral services for Judge Clay…”

Benjy looked up as Norm ran into the kitchen with his toothbrush clenched between his teeth. “Guess what!” He grinned, tucking his shirt into his pants. “Craig’s got a busted ankle. Last night a bunch of seniors went drinking up to the Flatts and they started pegging rocks off the pigman’s roof and then he started chasing them and Craig fell in the brook and ca-rack!” Norm chuckled. “No catcher for tomorrow’s game but me! Tell me there’s no God.” Norm laughed. He flipped his tie over his shoulder, then took the toothpaste from his pocket and started to brush his teeth over the kitchen sink.

Behind the cornflakes box Benjy sighed, relieved that it hadn’t been his father calling.

“Tell me there’s no such thing as Fate.” Norm glanced back with a foaming smile. “For every calamity there’s a great man! For the Civil War there was Lincoln!” After each declaration he spat into the sink, then brushed 26 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

furiously. “For the Depression there was FDR! And now for the Atkinson-Saint Mary’s game, there’s Norman Fermoyle!” He looked back. “Weeb said they got no choice. They gotta play me!” He held his tie to his chest and bent to drink from the faucet. “Damn ants,” he muttered, splashing them down the drain. “I was at Weeb’s house one time and Mrs. Miller saw an ant on the windowsill, one little ant, and she went nuts. Meanwhile this dump’s headquarters for every ant in the state.”

At this, Benjy’s tension erupted in a burst of laughter. Norm looked at him. “Jeez, you’re just like Weeb. You’ll laugh at anything!”

Swallowing hard, Benjy blinked himself into somberness. Norm sat down and drummed his fingertips on the table. The washing machine gently swished and splashed. From the radio Johnny Mathis was singing “The Twelfth of Never.” A faraway look came over Norm’s face. “The minute I woke up I knew something was going to happen today. Something special, something…” He looked at Benjy. “Something that’d make a real difference.

You know what I mean? You know how sometimes you just know? I mean, nobody’s gotta tell you. The minute the phone rang, I knew it was gonna be Weeb, and before he even said it, I knew he was gonna tell me I’d be playing tomorrow.” Norm sighed and shook his head in amazement.

“But how does Weeb know for sure?” Benjy asked. Because of a fight in the first game, Coach Graber hadn’t let Norm in a game all season.

“Where’ve you been?” Norm groaned in disgust. “He’s the manager!”

He stood up and opened the back door. “’Course, if you’d play a little ball yourself instead of hiding in the house, watching TV all the time…Hey!

Where the hell’s my glove?” He pointed up at the empty nail in the back hall. “I put it right there!”

Benjy shrugged. “Maybe you left it at practice.”

Norm’s eyes narrowed on him. “You didn’t take it, did you?”

“No!” Benjy said.

The rinse water drained out of the machine with a sucking groan. Paul Anka was singing “Lonely Boy.”

“You did, didn’t you, you little thief.” Norm pounded the table. “You took my glove!”

“No! Honest, Norm!”

From the other room a door slammed, and then came his sister’s shrill cry as she ran upstairs in her robe. “I don’t see why we can’t have a shower like normal people!”

“Because we’re not normal people!” their mother shouted from the bathroom. Upstairs, another door slammed.

Norm leaned over the table. “I can tell you’re lying. You took it! Jesus Christ, Benjy,” he pleaded. “I gotta go! Tell me where it is!”

“I didn’t take it!”

Now Norm’s square jaw quivered and his handsome face twisted as he sprang at Benjy and, grabbing him by the collar, yanked him half out of the chair. “Today’s my big chance!” he panted. “I gotta have my glove!”

“I don’t know where it is,” Benjy insisted. “Honest, Norm!”

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 27

The washing machine clanged to a stop. Paul Anka’s voice wailed into the sudden silence. Outside, Klubocks’ dog began to bark.

“Please, Benjy,” Norm begged. “You don’t know what this means to me.”

“Maybe that guy last night took it,” he said, remembering Duvall’s hungry eyes coveting every object in the room.

“What guy?” Norm asked.

“The one in the garage.”

“What do you mean?” Norm went to the back door and looked out at the garage. “I thought she took him to the depot.”

“She did and then she took him back here.”

“Why?” Norm asked, and Benjy shrugged. “You mean, he’s out there?

That creep’s out in the garage?” Norm said in a high voice.

Now the machine began to spin, its insides grinding, turning faster and faster and faster with the deafening, grating screech of metal on metal.

His mother raced into the kitchen in her slip. At the corner of her mouth was a jagged red smear where the lipstick had jerked when the machine went berserk. “Damn that Renie!” she cried, trying to push in the dial that would turn off the washer, but it wouldn’t budge. The machine continued its spin cycle with such force now that it shimmied out from the wall toward the table. “Bastard,” she groaned, pushing every button. With an angry clang the machine lurched and rocked out even more. There was no stopping it. She began to beat it. She pounded the quaking lid with her fists. Her hair hung in her face. Feet braced, back arched, she put both hands on the machine, trying to wrest it back. It was all Renie’s fault, she groaned, her ex-brother-in-law who had sold her this piece of shit, secondhand because she couldn’t afford new, never could, nothing but junk that never worked and a car that was on its last legs and “bills, nothing but goddamn bills and nobody cares! Nobody in the whole goddamn world cares!”

Alice came to the doorway pulling curlers from her hair. Norm yelled at his mother to stop it. With the machine still advancing, Benjy slid out of its way, out of everyone’s way, to put his bowl in the sink, where a clot of ants massed over the gravy on last night’s supper plates. He lifted the curtain from the window over the sink and saw Mr. Klubock in his white butcher’s coveralls pause on his back steps and glance warily across at the Fermoyle house. Down in the driveway sat Klubocks’ dog, its head cocked curiously up at Benjy.

“Get out of the way!” Norm bellowed, then reached behind the machine and yanked the cord from the outlet. Benjy turned off the radio and for a moment the only sound was Mr. Klubock’s car cruising down the street.

“What’s the matter with you?” Norm cried. “Are you crazy?”

His mother sagged against the refrigerator with her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving.

Norm threw down the cord. “That’s all you had to do! That’s all!”

At this her head whipped up. “That’s all? That’s all, huh?” She laughed a bitter teary laugh. “You think it’s so easy. You think everything’s so damn easy!”

28 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

Benjy looked away from his brother’s familiar sneer.

“Are you kidding?” Norm laughed. “In this nuthouse! With some bum sleeping in the garage! How the hell could anything be easy here?”

Her eyes flashed. “Nuthouse? Is that what it is?” Pointing, she came toward Norm, teeth clenched. He stared down at her hand jabbing his chest.

“Then get the hell out, if it’s such a nuthouse. Go live with your father! See how you like it in that nuthouse with your goddamn vicious aunt…”

“Mom!” Alice kept saying. “Mom!”

Sometimes Norm and their mother almost seemed to enjoy these battles, as if vying to see who could be sharper, more clever, more cruel.

“…and her creep of a husband, and your crazy senile grandmother singing nursery rhymes all night long in her crib, and your no-good, spineless, drunken father not giving a damn if his own kids live or die,” she hissed with one last strike at Norm’s chest.

He took her hand away and dropped it. “I’ll get out!” he said. “Gladly, but first you tell that little creep I want my glove!”

She spun around to Benjy.

“I don’t have his glove!” he said.

She laughed, but there were tears in her eyes. “A dollar a week I’m paying for that glove. A dollar a week Mr. Briscoe takes out of my measly paycheck and you lost it?” she sobbed, shaking her head at Norm. “You’re so damn careless! Nothing means anything to you, does it? All you care about is you!”

“It’s up there!” Alice cried, pointing to the top of the refrigerator. “Where you put it, Norm!”

Norm started to say something. Instead he grabbed his glove and books and ran down the driveway.