The Brothers K (33 page)

Everett still believed he had come up with a way of keeping tabs on Papa’s post-surgery pitching progress. Papa’s shedball garb had invariably consisted of a gray cotton sweatsuit, a baseball cap, a pair of black leather cleats, an outdated Rawlings infielder’s glove, and if the weather was
chill, an exhausted-looking but meticulously mended 1920s-vintage Chicago Cubs warm-up jacket inherited from his father, Everett Senior—who must have bought or begged it, since he never came that close to becoming a Cub himself. But one variation to this outfit, Everett noticed, was the cap: Papa owned sixteen in all—one from each team he’d ever played for, from high school on—and during our hedge hideout days Everett said he had noticed a definite correlation between Papa’s choice of cap and the quality of his pitching. When he’d first started out, for example, he usually wore the antique yellow-and-green doofus cap with the tiny bill and anemic little Whitman High W on it, whereas by the time he’d mastered the Kamikaze he was consistently wearing the blue cap with the orange pinstripes and the bold Medford
M
, from his Single A California League days.

It was a neat little notion, so when Papa began throwing again, Everett anxiously began checking his headgear for progress. The theory went belly-up at once, though, when night after night Papa kept donning the meaningless, khaki-and-gold
USGS
cap his “United States Goon Squad” teammate, Cap Ackerman, once mailed him as an April Fools’ gift.

That left us, finally, with just one feeble clue: sound effects. Each evening, during the uneasy silences on either side of our accursed suppertime graces, we’d listen to a few of Papa’s pitches whump against the mattress on the garage wall. But as the weeks rolled by, these whumps never changed: they always sounded as if Mama was out back by the clothesline, halfheartedly beating dust from a rug with a broom. There were no more thwams of balls against bare wood—which implied improved control. But there was no more power either. And Everett and I both found this so disheartening that before long we quit paying any attention at all.

One night around Halloween, though, I noticed Mama, of all people, smiling faintly at what I took to be some private musing—till I heard a mattress whump, saw her smile grow infinitesimally less faint, and realized that the volume had crept way up. The sound was insistent now, more as if thugs were throwing body punches into some poor bastard out behind the garage. And still no thwams, still the good control.

Then—one cool wet night in late November—the thugs got tired of fooling with punches, and started using a muffled gun.

Days passed. Snow fell. We moved into December.

The gunshots came closer.

It was a beautiful sound.

The muskrat will gnaw its third leg off to be free

—Henry David Thoreau

I
think that Everett and Peter, like me, expected the weeks following Papa’s declaration of our religious independence to be wondrous ones—a time for healing, and maybe for a heady redefining of the nature and purpose of our existences; a time of noticeable freedom, spiced with lots of free-form, late-night cosmological and philosophical joyrides.

But my brothers and I had
always
indulged in a lot of late-night conversational jungle-cruising—and in the early days of our post-Adventist period we were stunned to discover the extent to which Elder Babcock’s weekly hellfire harangue had given our free and easy wanderings their delicious barbecued flavor. The truth is that religious freedom as a stimulus to zesty conversation, to inner awareness, or to any sort of spiritual redefinition was a bland disappointment. What we’d gained from the
Psalm War explosion was three hours of idle time on Saturday mornings. The price of those three hours had been our relationship with our mother. It was not what I’d call a bargain.

The bargain got worse, though, when Mama granted us a second, unlooked-for independence. “You boys are now free to worship as you please,” she told us one evening shortly after her Cold War against us commenced, “so I think it’s time I gave you the freedom to do more than that. I think it’s time you did
everything
as you please. What do you think of that?”

We had to admit it sounded promising. “I would still ask you to obey the law,” she said, “and to be decent to your brother and sisters, and to attend high school till you graduate. And I’d prefer that you not smoke in the house, since it would drive your father crazy. But other than that, I think it’s about time you three began making all your own decisions. Don’t you agree?”

None of us smoked at all, let alone in the house, so I just laughed, feeling sure that she was joking. But when Everett grinned and said, “Well, gosh, if you insist,” and Peter murmured, “Sounds okay by me,” Mama pounced like Benito Lhosa on a bad bunt. “Done!” she said—as if that was that.

And sure enough, that
was
that: beginning the very next morning the three great religious revolutionaries found themselves “free” to spend not just their Seventh Days but every day of the week doing things like preparing their own breakfasts and lunches (or starving), laundering their own clothes (or stinking), and earning their own “expense accounts”—in my case via a 5
A.M
. bicycle paper route—to cover the costs of barbers (Mama had cut our hair), or shoe repairmen (she’d seen to this too), or J. C. Penney’s bargain basement clothes (our nonexistent skills as seamstresses rendered hand-me-downs useless). Meanwhile Irwin the Jolly Jesus Man went right on living his well-fed, well-groomed, prayerful Life of Riley, chortling things like “There but for the grace of God goes me!” and laughing himself sick every time one of us heretics jammed a sewing needle in a thumb, pulled on a kneeless pair of jeans, or trudged morosely off to school in underpants dyed pink from a washing with a new red sweatshirt.

Of course we deserved both the laughter and the underpants. We’d had no idea how much Mama had done for us. We’d been ingrates—and in a way it was a relief to discover it, because it made the inexcusable treatment Mama had been giving us seem almost excusable. We therefore set out to make some serious amends. A couple of days into our
Domestic Independence period we collected every penny we had and went on a shopping spree: Peter bought Mama a dozen red roses, I got her a two-pound box of Van Dyne’s candy, and Everett completely outdid himself, buying her a beautiful new family Bible (though he stamped the gift with his indelible touch by including a horrid little Hallmark card with three pigtailed Chinamen on it, bowing beneath the words “
BY GOLLY WE SOLLY
!”). We also wrote her a joint letter, making it clear that we’d been pigs and knew it, that the gifts were not intended to be bribes, and that it was only her friendship we wanted back, not her services. We even offered to cook
her
meals and do
her
yardwork and ironing and cleaning and shopping and laundry—if she’d only teach us how.

Her response? She told Peter, “Give the roses to the sick;” told me, “Give the candy to the gullible;” told Everett,
“You’re
the one in need of that Bible. And it’s your Heavenly Father you should be mailing that silly card to.” She added that she would do her own housework and cooking and shopping, “as God intended Christian wives and mothers to do,” and that she didn’t really need our friendship, thank you, she had the Lord Jesus Christ’s.

We were stunned. For the time being, we managed to hold our tongues. But we could all plainly see that, like the banging of Khrushchev’s shoe, this sort of shit could get old fast.

S
hortly after the Psalm War, Bet and Freddy invented a game called “Famous Scientists.” It was not a coincidence. The new game had nothing whatever to do with church, sports, prayers, pitching or any of the other family obsessions. In fact it was not so much a game as an all-out surrender to a way of life the rest of us were too religious, too athletic, too complicated or just too busy to comprehend—and that was the way they wanted it.

Famous Scientists, in Bet and Freddy’s eight-year-old view, were an elite handful of absentminded, charmingly disheveled, Margaret Mead or Louis Leakey-like personages who at some point in their earthly careers had simply said “Forget it!” to pedestrian jobs, lives and ways of thinking, and began to spend long, scintillating days working one ingenious experiment after another. It was a naïve definition, certainly. But the beauty of it—and the marked advantage over more sophisticated definitions—was
that it obliterated the usual gap between theory and action. Famous Science had nothing to do with things like knowing the difference between lepidopterology and otorhinolaryngology or Andy Celsius and Gabe Fahrenheit. All Famous Science had to do with was saying “Let’s be Famous Scientists!” to someone who could be depended upon to say “Okay!,” and then to behave and experiment accordingly.

During Mama’s most Bible-headed periods the twins sometimes remained in Famous Science Mode for days at a time, and as the years passed it became crucial for my brothers and me to recognize this mode, because our Scientists were increasingly attracted to the field of experimental psychology, and their “lab rats” of choice were their ever-credulous brothers. It can be more than a minor annoyance to find that the innocuous chat you’ve just had with a seemingly air-headed, bubble-gum-smacking, preadolescent girl was in fact a prefabricated, carefully calculated quiz designed to lay bare the most inane foible of your personality. It can also be troubling to find that every cross-grained, self-damning sentence you just blabbed without thinking has been immortalized in one of Famous Science’s increasingly nefarious lab notebooks.

But the psychological dismemberment of male siblings was a later twist. Most of the early Famous Science research tended to be either in no recognizable field of science or else in three or four fields intrepidly bulldozed together. Take, for example, a little experiment known to its progenitors as “Centrifuging Flickers”:

A red-shafted flicker is a lovely mottled woodpecker with war-painted cheeks, auburn pinions and, when fleeing, a rump as startlingly white as any Caucasian skinny-dipper’s. They were so common in Camas that, during hard winter rains, six or eight of them would frequently come to roost in the warmth and dryness of our second-story eaves—and hearing, just inches from our heads as we lay in bed, the talons of a sleeping woodpecker tightening their grip on the siding was a stirring experience. Unfortunately, the flicker’s sole method of expressing gratitude for a warm night’s sleep was even more stirring: it came smack at the rosy crack of dawn, and consisted of a beak-on-siding applause that sounded, from the sleeper’s side of the siding, about like machine-gun fire sounds from the point-blank side of the machine gun. Mill-town people cherish their sleep. After all, come morning it’s time to go work at the mill. For this reason a lot of starling-brained Camas residents used to deal with their red-shafted machine-gun problems by leaning out their windows and blasting away with retaliatory BB, pellet or even shotgun fire. I’m
proud to say that the Chance family resorted to more enlightened measures: we just unleashed our Famous Scientists on them.

“Centrifuging” was a concept the twins had gleaned from Famous Science’s most formidable new ally and supporter, Marion Becker Chance. While buttering a homemade scone for each of them in her apartment one morning, this fanatical pacifist and devoted birdwatcher unwittingly mentioned that a centrifuge was any rapidly rotating apparatus that used centrifugal force to separate substances of different densities—for instance butterfat from milk. That her increasingly scientific hence increasingly adorable granddaughters would take this innocuous bit of information, add a flashlight, a stepladder and a smelt-dipper’s net with a twelve-foot handle to it, and proceed to apply it to one of her favorite woodpeckers was unthinkable. But, as anyone who’s ever seen a mushroom cloud, a cooling tower or an aerosol can of cheese spread can tell you, the unthinkable is often the very thing the Famous Scientist comes up with.

Centrifuging flickers was a straightforward process: waiting till well after sunset, when the roosting flickers had gone into their rainy-night torpor, our two Scientists donned raincoats (the birds only came during downpours), snuck out under the eaves, flashlighted a prospective victim, set up and climbed the ladder, and caught a stupefied flicker in the smelt net. After “tagging” the bird’s ankle with a piece of adhesive-tape labeled “CENTRIFUGED 2-25-’65” (or whatever the date), they would fold it gently but tightly back into the smelt net, turn on Papa’s shedball spotlights, start giggling with anticipation, march out into the middle of the backyard, grab the very end of the net’s twelve-foot handle in their four little hands, and proceed to centrifuge their captive’s brains out by twirling round and round, fast as they could go, while the experiment’s greatest fan (guess who?) sat howling and loon-laughing his appreciation from an upstairs window.

We’re not sure whether the Scientists ever actually separated, say, a flicker’s blood from its lymphatic fluids or its gizzard juice from its stones, but we
are
sure that not one of the tagged-and-processed birds that wobbled off into the night ever showed its Caucasoid rump in our eaves again. One good centrifuging lasted a lifetime.

W
hen in the Course of Human Events it became necessary for three of four Brothers to dissolve the Theological Bands which had connected them with their Mother, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitled them, they discovered, to their utter amazement, that nothing much changed: they spent a couple hours each Saturday listening to the Elders Reese and Dean (as in Dizzy and Pee Wee) instead of Babcock and Barnes, and that was about it. But when, as Free and Independent Sons, they were granted (or saddled with) the Power to do their own Cooking, Cleaning, Mending, Shopping, Personal Maintenance and Grooming, Laundry, Ironing and all other Domestic Acts and Things which Independent Sons must of right do, they discovered, to their everlasting astonishment, that
everything
changed …