The Laments (30 page)

“It doesn’t require plenty of money,” said Howard. “I’ll do it myself.”

“Darling, you’ve never repaired a house before.”

“All the more reason to do it,” said Howard. “I like a challenge.”

Julia had noticed Howard’s energy diminish over the last year; his zeal to embark on a project like this was encouraging. “You’d need help, darling.”

“Behold, three sons!” said Howard, clasping the boys’ shoulders. All at once, Howard seemed the one with the energy, while his sons gazed fearfully at the porch.

Julius replied warily. “You mean, carrying things?”

“Hammering, sawing, lifting, and building!” replied Howard. “It’ll be fun!”

Persuaded by his enthusiasm, Julia decided this project might help Howard pull himself together; and perhaps her blindness about the house’s defects reflected her inattention to family life, now that she was a working mother. For all these reasons, she gave him her blessing.

That weekend, Howard enlisted the boys’ help in replacing the four rotting pillars with pine two-by-fours. To Will’s eye, the supports looked too unsteady for the enormous porch roof, and his father appeared similarly fragile. Though Howard looked tall and substantial in a suit, in jeans and a red flannel shirt his lack of muscle was obvious.

“Are you sure those beams will hold up the porch, Dad?” Will asked.

“Absolutely.” To prove his point, Howard gave one of the supports a confident rap with his hammer. At this, part of the porch ceiling fell away and Julius, standing below it, was showered with black dust.

“That needs to be scraped and painted,” said Howard. “I’ll add it to the list.”

Later, Julia drew Will aside to ask how the renovation was going. Will sensed that she was more concerned about his father than the project. “I’m just afraid that he’ll hurt himself,” she admitted.

After promising to keep an eye on Howard, Will asked Julia a question that had been worrying him all weekend.

“Mum, how can I play for Calvin’s team when he’s a bigot?”

“If it bothers you, why don’t you join the other team?”

“Then I’ll make an enemy out of him, and they’ll probably bench me for being a foreigner.”

Julia sighed. “As Hamlet said, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.’ It’s only baseball, darling.”

IN THE FIRST GAME
, Jed Nissen, first baseman and Calvin’s star hitter, slapped his knees with laughter when Will struck out.

“Man, you really suck, Lament!”

“He hardly played the game before,” said Calvin. “Keep at it, Mr. Rhoh-desia, you’ll get the idea.”

“By then, it’ll be basketball season,” Nissen laughed. He was the only member of the team opposed to having Will join them. He loved baseball. The girls adored him, with his dark eyes, square jaw, and mischievous grin; even Dawn Snedecker’s glasses fogged when he smiled at her.

After striking out a second time, Will offered to sit out the game.

“Stick it out!” said Calvin. “You’ll get the hang of it. Anyhow, we ain’t gonna lose against a bunch of niggers.”

The other team was mixed, black kids and white kids. One of them was a boy Will recognized from riding his bike to school. Roy Biddle had deep black skin and almond-shaped eyes. His hair was always cropped incredibly short, with the indent of his jaw visible behind his ears. He’d heckle Will from his porch in the mornings.

“Hey, English,” Roy would shout. “Gimme a ride!”

Will would shake his head as he passed by, and Roy would leap from the porch and sprint until he was running alongside Will.

“Gimme a ride,
Englis
h
!”

“Sorry,” said Will.

“Why not, English?”

“Because I saw you take somebody’s bike last week.”

“Goddamn English!” Roy would shout, grinning, and he would pump his arms and legs and tear ahead of Will to prove that he didn’t actually
need
a ride on anybody’s bike. Roy was one hell of a runner. And a pretty good batter, too.

On Will’s third turn at bat, he struck out again. He offered, at this point, to withdraw from the team.

“No way. I picked you,” said Calvin. “You’re on my team, for good!”

To Will, this seemed more of a sentence than a vote of confidence.

When the other side was up at bat, Roy Biddle hit a ball that tore down the foul line at eye level, and struck Calvin’s cheek. Stunned, Calvin dabbed his face and held up a bloody finger for his teammates to see.

“Hey, coach, that nigger almost killed me!”

“That’s enough, Tibbs!” snapped Coach Lunetta, examining the wound. “Go to the nurse and clean it up. While you’re at it, wash out that filthy mouth of yours!”

Refusing to see the nurse, Calvin paraded around the pitcher’s mound, making sure the wound was visible to everybody.

“Tibbs! Throw the ball or get off the field!” shouted the coach.

Roy hit the next ball in a steep arc way above center field, where Will was standing. Will reached out with his bare hands. He preferred the English habit of not wearing gloves to catch a ball.

“He’s gonna drop it!” sneered Nissen.

Roy threw down his bat and began running, knees and elbows pumping like pistons, the dust rising from his feet in little explosions, advancing toward first base while his eyes shot back and forth between the careening ball and Will’s outstretched hands.

“You can’t catch
nothin’,
English!” he roared as he sprinted for second base.

Will heard the echo of Roy’s voice along with Nissen’s scornful remarks, but he made no step, no adjustment in preparation for the ball’s arrival. He just stared. For a moment the ball eclipsed the sun, and then hurtled toward him. As his teammates shouted in dismay, Will splayed his fingers and the ball stopped dead in his palm.

“Yes, Rhoh-desia!” shouted Calvin.

“Lucky sumbitch,” said Nissen.

“Goddamn English!”
moaned Roy as he collided with the second baseman.

Nissen whistled. “If his mouth was open he’da swallowed the damn ball!”

Calvin gave the story his own spin.

“Nigger tries to kill me, so Mr. Rhoh-desia here wipes him out! Doesn’t move, just
plucks
that thing out of the sky like a ripe apple. See this cut here? That’s a racist attack on my person. I say Roy Biddle got what he had coming thanks to Mr. Rhoh-desia here!”

“Calvin, please don’t call me Mr. Rhodesia anymore,” said Will.

“Aren’t you proud of your background?” replied Calvin.

“No, because it doesn’t
mean
what you think,” said Will. “I don’t hate blacks.”

“Well, I’m Irish,” replied Calvin. “And my dad said the Irish were the white niggers back when.”

In Calvin’s society, as far as Will could tell,
somebody
had to be the nigger.

News about the catch spread around school. By the end of the day, everyone was calling Will Mr. Rhodesia. But in English, Dawn Snedecker threw Will a sharp glance.

“I hear you’re Calvin Tibbsh’sh besht friend now. I’m not shurprished.”

“All I did was catch a ball,” he replied.

“You’re dishgushting!” she answered.

Will began to feel she was right. He had unwittingly become part of a mob—the very thing his father abhorred.

Poverty

The school baseball season was cut short by three weeks of continuous rain in October. This was a blessed thing as far as Will was concerned, but it was a crisis for the Laments. On Monday, the hot water vanished. On Tuesday, Howard ventured into the basement and found the hot-water heater immersed in a pool of mud. On Wednesday, the plumbers explained that the previous owner always got flooded in rainy weather, and suggested that Howard dig the cellar floor deeper. The boys were enlisted to do the job on Saturday morning, but when Will returned from a trip to the store he found the twins rolling over each other in a mud fight. Whatever progress they had made was destroyed in the scuffle.

That evening it rained again, and so much water collected in the porch roof that the two-by-four supports snapped like matchsticks. The entire structure fell with a monstrous crash.

By noon on Sunday, a building inspector was rapping at the Laments’ door. Will couldn’t help studying the inspector’s face—it was alarmingly familiar.

“You’ve endangered the safety of everyone on this street, Mr. Lament.”

“Nonsense,” replied Howard. “I took every precaution. And not a soul has been hurt!” Any authority in Howard’s voice was belied by his hair, which pointed up like a thistle.

“Well, Mr. Lament, let’s just say you’re a lucky man. Now, unfortunately, this being a commercial zone, there’s a fine.” The inspector took a citation book from his satchel and licked his pencil.

“A commercial zone? What are you talking about?” said Howard.

The inspector wrote in a tight script, pausing to lick his pencil every line or so. “There’s a barbershop across the street, a drugstore two doors down, and the laundromat another three blocks east. I believe fines are doubled in a commercial zone.”

“But this is a residence and it’s my first offense. Can’t you be lenient?”

The inspector peered at Howard over his wire-rimmed glasses with an expression appropriate for the worst kind of criminal.

“Lenient? You could have killed somebody’s grandma.”

“Nonsense!” Howard was incensed. “Do
you
have a granny who could hurdle the rope surrounding my porch, and fall asleep on bare floorboards under a leaking roof during a bloody thunderstorm?”

The building inspector’s lips tightened. “My grandmother’s passed away, sir. I couldn’t say.” Again, Will was sure he recognized this fellow from somewhere. “As for the fine, it’ll be five hundred dollars.”

“Five hundred? Outrageous. What is your name, sir? I will lodge a complaint.”

“My name is Ralph Snedecker. And I’ll take that check now.”

Will shrank back. It all made sense—the wire-rimmed glasses, the righteous disapproval: these must run in the family.

After Howard wrote the check and Mr. Snedecker went on his way, Will felt a crushing sense of shame. The Snedeckers would tell the whole town that the Laments were not only racist but reckless misfits.

“Don’t worry, Will. We’ll give Mr. Snedecker a run for his money. That check’s going to bounce,” said Howard.

IT WAS A PARTICULARLY COLD NOVEMBER
. The fuel bills were high and Howard locked the thermostat at sixty-five degrees; everybody dressed in layers and wore socks to bed. Julia was sensitive to the cold, and despite her long underwear and two pairs of socks, her nose would run while she slept. One evening in the darkness, when the wind was especially shrill and the third notice had arrived from Mr. Snedecker, Julia voiced her concerns.

“Howard, what are we going to do? The savings account is empty and we’ve got bills we can’t pay.”

“Australia,” came the groggy reply. “We’ll go to Australia.”

“Australia?” she replied. “Howard, please, be serious!”

“I’m busy fixing our home, darling. You’ll just have to sell more houses at that job of yours.”

Julia couldn’t miss the edge to his voice.
That job of yours
. His point was simple: if they couldn’t travel, their debt was her problem.

Howard’s obsession with moving was intensified when he discovered five years’ worth of
National Geographic
s stored in a rusty tin trunk in the basement. For the next week he forgot the renovation and pored over the pictures, dreaming of faraway escapes.

As more rain came and the basement flooded again, Howard abandoned the cellar and set his mind to another task; the living room ceiling was sagging.

“But what about the porch?” Julia said.

“Can’t afford to fix it just now, darling,” explained Howard cheerfully.

“And the basement?”

Howard muttered something about needing dry weather to finish. One evening, he sawed a hole in the ceiling while they were watching television, and a mess of foul-smelling debris landed on the carpet. A dribble of water from the toilet’s supply hose had done the damage. The next morning, Howard rented a blowtorch to repair the toilet valve.

“Are you sure you’re comfortable doing that?” asked Julia with delicacy, as she prepared to leave for work.

Howard reacted indignantly. “Darling, it’s a
valve
. If there’s one thing I know about, it’s valves!”

When she returned that evening, there was an enormous scorch mark on the bathroom wall and Howard was nowhere to be seen. Julia’s heart began a drumbeat as she searched the other rooms, unable to find him or any of the boys. She was about to call the hospital when Howard clambered out of the basement cradling a stack of
National Geographic
maps.

“For God’s sake, Howard, what happened in the bathroom?”

“Oh, that!” Howard chuckled. “Had a bit of a fire. Don’t worry. A little wallpaper and nobody will ever know.”

“Wallpaper? What about the ceiling? And the basement? And the porch?”

Julia stared at her husband as he muttered some excuses; she tried to suppress the awful realization that Howard and the house were locked in some bizarre contest that would culminate in their mutual destruction.

“Darling,” she said, forcing herself to change the subject, “there’s a Christmas party at the realty office this week. It would be wonderful if you could bring the boys in, combed and brushed, so that everybody can meet them.”

Howard nodded, sweeping the cellar cobwebs off his cricket sweater. “Of course,” he replied. “Combed and brushed; I suppose that includes me!” he added with a defeated expression.

“Of course, darling,” she replied gently. “Everybody is looking forward to meeting you, too.”

CAREY BRISTOL ANNOUNCED
that there would be presents for everyone at the Christmas party. It had been a good year for Roper Realty, though Julia had sold only two houses.

“We all have tough years,” Carey assured her. “Next year will be better.”

At five o’clock, Emil DeVaux’s four daughters were ushered in by his wife, Dorothy, a dark, fierce little woman who glared at Julia.

“She thinks you’re a temptress, just working here to seduce the men,” explained Brautigan.