The Mourning Hours (6 page)

ten

T
here was no way I could tell anyone about that afternoon. Mom and Dad would yell loud enough to be heard in three counties. Emilie would use the information as a bargaining tool in the future.

Besides, I wasn’t exactly sure how to describe what had happened. The sex wasn’t even the bad part, not really. There was sex in just about every movie on TV, even though Mom cleared her throat pointedly and Dad changed the channel before anything got too detailed. Sure, Pastor Ziegler said every single Sunday that “sexual impurity” was explicitly forbidden by God, but the act itself didn’t seem that strange. My parents had done it, and their parents before them, and even, presumably, Pastor Ziegler and his wife. It didn’t seem all that crazy that Johnny and Stacy would give it a try, too. No, what I kept replaying over and over in my mind was their argument afterward: Stacy refusing to leave, Johnny kicking his dresser, then gunning the engine of the Green Machine.

And of course, I couldn’t say anything to Johnny. I’m not sure what I would have said, even if I had dared, but the thing that kept coming to my mind was that I was sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have talked to Stacy that day under the bleachers. I shouldn’t have given her message to Johnny. I shouldn’t have encouraged her. Up until that afternoon, I’d been obsessed with Stacy myself. Now she scared me—she was too intense, too demanding. The further things went between Stacy and Johnny, the worse things got at home with Mom, the more I felt the heat of guilt creeping up my skin and sinking low in my stomach.

But if Johnny had been bothered by Stacy that day, he quickly forgot it. That very weekend, they went to a concert with friends in Green Bay. The next week she came over for dinner, and they held hands underneath the table. Their kisses, with her back pressed against the Camaro, were just as passionate as they had been before.

By mid-October, Johnny’s mind was more or less occupied with wrestling, anyway. His schedule was packed with predawn runs, after-school practices and weekend scrimmages. Mom and Dad agreed that this would be a good distraction for him, and things seemed to be settling down. There had been no more notes in the wash—either Stacy had stopped writing them or Johnny had become better at hiding them, and after a while, Mom started to soften toward Stacy, encouraging Johnny to invite her over on weeknights to study. “Better to keep them under our noses,” she’d say to Dad.

Stacy stopped by now and then in the evenings that fall, when Johnny was newly showered from practice, wet hairs still curling on his neck. She and Johnny “studied” in the kitchen, their feet entwined beneath the table, while Mom banged dishes noisily in the sink. They “studied” on the living room couch, textbooks balanced on their knees, Stacy’s head fitting perfectly into the crook of Johnny’s neck, while Dad snoozed in his recliner. Watching them, it seemed to me that they were drawn together like barbed wire to cow magnets.

I kept a close eye on Stacy at all times, half in love with her, half scared of what she might do. Sometimes it felt as if I’d imagined the whole scene in Johnny’s bedroom, the bedsprings squeaking, her protests that she wasn’t going to leave.... Sitting on the couch next to Johnny, she seemed as sweet and harmless as a slice of apple pie.

I couldn’t help watching her stomach, too—to see if it began to pooch out the way it happened with the married women at church. First it was a rounded blip, then a tight waistline, and before you knew it we were gathered in the church basement among streams of blue or pink crepe paper, discussing stretch marks and twenty-hour labors.

If it happened to those women at church, it could happen to Stacy Lemke, too. I spied on her whenever I got a chance, peeking at her stomach around the edges of my history textbook. I tried to imagine slender Stacy with her belly button protruding, her hands gripping the sides of her stomach, lowering herself carefully to sit. And what would Johnny be like as a father? Proud? Embarrassed?

It was funny because this—or something like this—was what I’d wanted last summer, when my heart had done a lopsided somersault every time I’d bumped into Stacy Lemke in town. I’d wanted Stacy for Johnny so that I could have a bit of Stacy for myself. But somehow, I thought, it had all gone wrong.

“Let me braid your hair, Kirsten,” Stacy coaxed on one of those fall evenings.

I considered, then shook my head slowly.

“Aw, come on,” Stacy said, reaching for me playfully.

“I don’t know.”

She reached for me anyway, her hands gathering a mess of hair at the back of my neck. Last summer I would have loved this. I would have melted into a puddle at her touch. Now I remembered the way she and Johnny had laughed at me, and I pulled back. “I don’t want to.”

Stacy sank back into the couch, frowning, her arms folded across her chest.

Johnny sighed. “Don’t you have some homework to do, pip-squeak? Something upstairs?”

I slipped off the couch and plodded to my room, where Emilie was engrossed in this month’s
Seventeen.
The cover read, “Thirteen Ways to Wear this Skirt.” How could there be thirteen ways to wear a skirt? I could only think of one.

“Do you think Johnny and Stacy will get married in our church or her church?” I asked.

Emilie gave me a look of disgust and went back to her magazine. “They’re not getting married, dummy,” she said. “They’re just dating, that’s all.”

“But if they really love each other—”

Emilie dog-eared a page of the magazine and set it aside. “Let’s put it this way. If they get married, it’s because she’s pregnant. If she gets pregnant, her parents will kill Johnny, then her. So there won’t even be a wedding to worry about.
Capisce?
” That was her new word, picked up from TV.

I sighed.
“Capisce.”

Even after careful watching, I really couldn’t tell if there was a difference in Stacy. Johnny, on the other hand, had become suddenly gaunt. He had gone on the wrestler’s diet like he did every fall, shedding the weight he’d gained during the spring and summer. It wasn’t unusual for Johnny to hit 190 pounds in the off-season, although he wrestled in the 160s. In the past, he’d eaten egg-white shakes for breakfast, ran laps around the barn, jumped rope, sprinted up the bleachers, lifted weights in the gym. Sweated, then sweated some more.

But this year, he’d lost much of the weight without even trying. I didn’t notice it when he was bundled up in sweatshirts and warm-up pants, but when he sat across from us at the kitchen table in just a T-shirt, his arms looked positively scrawny, his chest sunken. Any sign of a bulge on his stomach—Aunt Julia’s lingonberry kuchen, Mom’s beef brisket—had completely disappeared.

“Are you trying to drop another weight class or something?” Dad asked one night when Johnny refused a second helping of Mom’s turkey tetrazzini.

Johnny shrugged. “I ate something before practice.”

Dad sat back in his chair, studying Johnny carefully. “Does Coach want you to drop more weight?”

Johnny looked back at him. “I’m not dropping weight.”

“Sure looks like you are.”

Johnny shrugged again. He brought a spoonful to his mouth slowly, as if in rebuttal. “Well, I’m not trying to.”

“But you are,” Mom said pointedly. “Are you feeling sick?” She reached across the table for his forehead, but withdrew her hand when he pulled back.

“I’m fine,” Johnny insisted. “You’re making too big a deal out of this.”

Later that evening, Dad called Coach Zajac, and Coach recommended less running and more weight lifting, more carbohydrates and fewer vegetables. “Coach says we’ll get him back on track,” Dad said, hanging up the phone. “Although he might not be a bad wrestler in the 150s, if it came to that.”

Mom pursed her lips together, shaking her head. “You two wouldn’t care if Johnny was a skeleton, so long as it gave him an advantage.”

When I dreamed that night, it was of Johnny on the mats, a skin-and-bones cadaver performing some strange, macabre dance. In the stands, Stacy was watching him, her hands folded beneath her belly.

eleven

W
inter, which had only been flirting with us up to that point, made a serious appearance in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Overnight, everything green disappeared beneath thick white snowdrifts. Mom dragged the boxes of our heaviest winter sweaters down from the attic, and we began listening to the local news each morning, praying for a snow day. It was so cold that Kennel was allowed inside the barn, where he terrorized our farm cats, essentially treeing them in the hayloft. One Saturday, Dad and Jerry cut down a fir from the woods behind our property and lugged it inside our house, then left it to Emilie and me to decorate with looping strings of tinsel and uneven rows of blinking lights. Mom brought down boxes from the attic, and we dug out our favorite ornaments—the clothespin reindeer Grandma Hammarstrom had made for us when we were little, the palm-print casts from our years in kindergarten, Johnny’s palm then as big as mine now. I ate almost as much popcorn as I strung.

We hosted Christmas dinner, complete with too-dry turkey and Mom’s creamy green bean casserole. Uncle Paul and Aunt Julia were there, as well as our cousin, Brent, and his fiancée, and a few of Mom’s cousins from northern Wisconsin. Jerry joined us, helping to cut the turkey with slow, precise strokes. “This man knows his way around a bird,” Dad had announced, clapping Jerry on the shoulder. With an apron tied around her neck and pot holders for hands, Mom was in her element. Grandpa gave horse rides on his knee to the toddlers, and Stacy stopped by, too, after the Lemkes’ family meal. Through it all, Johnny picked at his food like a fussy toddler.

It snowed every day of our Christmas break, and once the excitement of our presents had worn off, Emilie and I were mostly cooped up. She practiced the clarinet for hours on end, until even Dad requested that John Philip Sousa be confined to the basement,
please.
A friend rescued Emilie for a day of shopping in Milwaukee, and Mom took me ice-skating at the indoor rink in Waukesha with Katie and Kari Schultz and a few other girls from school, but otherwise, the weeks passed in a blue chill of boredom. Even as we watched TV or read books or played marathon games of double solitaire, it seemed our whole family was holding its breath for Johnny.

We didn’t miss a meet that season. Piled into the Caprice, we followed the Ships’ bus to tournaments in Kiel and Fond du Lac and Menomonee Falls, then spent entire Saturdays in the bleachers waiting for Johnny to wrestle, standing every so often to stretch our backs or relieve our behinds. Even Grandpa came along, although he complained that the car ride was too long and we sat in the bleachers too long and it took too long to make it all the way through the brackets.

Stacy was at every tournament, too. During the long lulls between Johnny’s matches, she sat in a corner of the gymnasium with the other kids from Lincoln High. The girls took turns braiding each other’s hair or passing around homework to be copied; they snapped gum and sucked lollipops and leaned close, heads together, for a whispered conversation that ended in a bout of hysterical laughter. Stacy carried a thick binder that was completely covered with doodles.
Stacy and Johnny. I love Johnny H. Stacy Lynne Hammarstrom.
It made me feel funny, to see her trying on our name for size.

She always crossed the bleachers to say hello to us, to chat about how Johnny was doing or how Johnny was feeling or who Johnny was up against. She had become a wrestling expert overnight. “See that one there, in the green sweatshirt? That’s Crowley, he’s in the 160s, too. That’s Johnny’s toughest opponent of the day,” she would say, bent into our airspace. From her necklace dangled the gold heart locket that Johnny had bought her for Christmas, with the money he’d saved from doing his chores and other odd jobs around our farm.

When Johnny was on the mat, Stacy was a ball of nerves. She whispered, over and over, “Get him, Johnny, pin him, Johnny” like a breathless rosary. Once, when the tension became too much, she grabbed my hand and squeezed it until tears pooled in the corners of my eyes. Even when I tried to wriggle free, she hung on, not noticing.

Johnny qualified for regionals at the end of February, and Stacy made the drive to Wausau with us. Wrapped in a navy peacoat over her Ships sweatshirt, she perched in the middle of the backseat between Emilie and me and insisted that she was perfectly comfortable, even though her long legs were wedged against the front seat. Mom turned on the radio and hummed along to the Top 40. Mostly we watched the frozen Wisconsin countryside pass in a dull blur through our windows.

“You know what?” Stacy confessed into my ear at one point. “I have this theory. If I’m watching Johnny’s match, then he’ll win. If I don’t watch, he’ll lose. Like it’s all up to me. Is that crazy, or what?”

I looked up to see Dad glancing at Stacy in the rearview mirror. I could tell from the rigid way that Mom was holding her neck that she was listening, too.

We were joining Johnny on the second day of regionals; to move on to state, he would have to wrestle his way through a thirty-two-man bracket. Coach Zajac spotted us in the gym immediately and waved us over.

“How’s he doing?” Dad asked, extending his hand for a shake.

“Three wins. First guy, he pinned in only twenty seconds. He ran into a tough guy in the second round, kid who kept shoving him around, and the ref wasn’t calling it. So Johnny roughed him up a bit.”

“Oh, yeah?” Dad asked.

“Got him in an arm bar, twisted it too far, and all of a sudden the kid’s screaming.” Coach shook his head, a smile playing on his lips. “Your kid doesn’t take crap from anyone, that’s for sure. Come on, let’s say hi to some folks.”

Coach walked Dad around the gymnasium, introducing him to scouts and WIAA officials and reporters who had come all the way from Milwaukee. Stacy and Emilie found friends to sit with, and Mom, with a spirit of abandon, ordered us greasy slices of cheese pizza and bottles of Coca-Cola from the snack stand in the foyer. When we took our seats in the bleachers later, my stomach was protesting.

Johnny, prepping for his matches, kept to himself. He seemed to lurk in one corner of the gym or another, his face mostly hidden by the hood of his sweatshirt. We watched him pin his opponent from Sturgeon Bay easily, securing his place in the final. Someone behind us said, “Watch out for that one. He nearly broke a kid’s arm last night.” I turned around, trying to identify the speaker, but no face stood out of the crowd.

Then Johnny wandered over to us, the straps of his singlet hanging down, a few ribs and curly golden chest hairs visible. Sweat shone on his forehead.

“How are you holding up, kiddo?” Dad asked.

He shrugged. “Okay.”

“Are you hungry?” Mom asked.

Johnny pulled his warm-up jacket over his head. “I guess.”

Mom produced her wallet and handed over a five-dollar bill, carefully, as if she was parting with a small fortune.

“Thanks,” he said, and wandered off in the direction of the Ships cheering section. Stacy was waving her arms back and forth beneath a sign that read “GO JOHNNY H!” in three-foot letters, and Johnny raised one hand in greeting and moved toward her.

“When’s his next match?” Mom asked, checking her watch.

“Probably an hour, hour and a half.”

Yawning, I stretched out on the bleacher, my head on Mom’s lap. While we waited in the stands, people from Watankee and Manitowoc kept wandering over to talk to Dad and Mom for prolonged congratulations and rather boring discussions about wrestling. Another Ships teammate, 119-pound Dirk Bauer, was headed for the finals, too, and all in all it was a good showing for the Ships. I sneaked a few pieces of hard candy from Mom’s purse and let them dissolve, one by one, on my tongue.

Then the first call for the middleweight classes was announced over the loudspeaker. I sat up, paying attention. That meant Johnny would be taking the mats within half an hour. I suddenly started to feel a bit of Stacy’s nerves—my brother could be a regional wrestling champion in only thirty minutes.

We waited anxiously as skinny, pale Dirk Bauer vied for victory. I looked around for Johnny, but it was hard to see with the cluster of people near the mats.

As if reading my mind, Mom asked, “Where’s Johnny? I don’t see him out there.” She craned her neck around a family walking in front of us.

“He’s gotta be down there somewhere,” Dad said, unconcerned. I stood in the bleachers, straining to see over the heads of the people in front of me, but couldn’t find Johnny, either. Of course he was down there—the whole team was there to support Dirk Bauer. Curious, I looked over at the small student cheering section in the far corner of the bleachers. Stacy’s sign was propped against the wall, but I didn’t see her. I waved at Emilie, who nodded her head ever so slightly in recognition.

The 125-pounders took the mats, shook hands and the referee started the match.

Over the loudspeaker, the announcer’s voice said, “Second call for 160 pounds, Hammarstrom from Lincoln.”

Dad stood, looking around. “Johnny’s not down there?”

“He’s here somewhere,” Mom reasoned, standing, too. “Where could he be?”

I spotted Coach Zajac at the same time Dad did. He was standing at the foot of the bleachers, surveying the stands. Dad raised his hands palms-up, asking the question. Coach shook his head.

“Jesus!” Dad swore. “Where the hell is he?”

From the center of the gym, we heard the ref’s hand slap the mat, setting off a wild celebration. Someone had been pinned.

“He doesn’t get his ass on that mat and he’s out,” Dad said, loud enough that the family sitting in front of us turned to look. He started down the bleachers in a quick jog, taking the steps two at a time.

“Where could he be?” Mom moaned. “Do you see Stacy anywhere?”

I’d been looking but still hadn’t spotted her.

We followed Dad’s progress around the perimeter of the gym floor, wending his way brusquely between slow-moving groups of parents.

“Shit,” Mom said.

Dad reached the set of double doors leading into the foyer at the exact moment that Johnny burst through them with Stacy in tow. I didn’t need to be in hearing range to know exactly what Dad said; Johnny started across the floor in a quick sprint, wriggling out of his warm-up jacket as he went. For a second, Dad glared at Stacy. It looked as if she was trying to apologize, but Dad wasn’t having any of it. He turned his back on her and marched back to the bleachers. Stacy followed slowly, walking past us and up the bleachers to her section. One of her red barrettes was missing, I noticed, and the hair on the top of her head was mussed.

Mom was shaking her head when Dad rejoined us in the stands. “Do you see what I’m talking about now?” she hissed.

Dad was still seething, but more quietly now. “I swear, I’m going to kill that kid,” he said under his breath.

And Mom said, half joking, “Which one?”

Stacy found a seat in the bleachers, but now she was sitting a little apart from everyone else, hugging her arms to her chest. What had happened in the hour or so when they’d been alone? I remembered with a shudder that afternoon in Johnny’s bedroom, with Johnny insisting they had to leave, and Stacy refusing.

It was eight-thirty when Johnny took the mat for the championship match against Plinker, a squat kid from Onalaska. Watching them face off in the circle, I was amazed they were in the same weight class. Plinker was almost a head shorter than Johnny, his body tense with muscle and movement. Johnny was tall and powerful, but looked as if he could use a good meal or three.

Our part of the gymnasium chanted as one:
John-ny, John-ny!
On the other side of the gym, fans took up a cheer for his opponent.

Photographers crouched at the edge of the mat, focusing their lenses.

“You get him! You get him, Johnny!” Dad yelled.

“Come on, Johnny, come on!” Mom called.

Johnny entered the circle, crouched, shook hands with Plinker.

The ref blew the whistle, stepped back, and the two began stalking each other, their bodies circling, teasing, tangling, positioning.

From the mats, I could hear Coach Zajac’s voice, although his exact orders were lost in the din. Calls of encouragement came from the stands. “Let’s go, already!” someone yelled close to my ear. The wrestlers from the lower weight classes formed a loose ring around the perimeter, chanting.

Johnny lunged, and Plinker caught his arm. Using Johnny’s momentum against him, Plinker caught him off balance and threw him to his back. Johnny hit the mat with a thud, his legs flipping over his body.

“No!” I screamed.

Johnny had three seconds to get out of the pin. I’d seen him do this before on our living room carpet. Feet on the mat, he arched his back, bridging to keep from being pinned. Johnny rolled to the right, grabbing Plinker’s arm. I was watching it as if in slow motion, Johnny on his knees, finding his footing with Plinker behind him, trying to bring Johnny back to ground. Within seconds, Johnny was up, and they separated.

Dad had been clutching Mom’s arm, and his grasp slowly eased in relief.

The circling began again. Johnny was moving faster now, angered by the close call. He lunged forward, reaching for Plinker. There was a blur of limbs, a mad scramble of maneuvering, two sets of thigh muscles quivering. Johnny got hold of Plinker’s arm and moved behind him, twisting. The
arm bar,
a position of strength—I remembered that. Johnny had the leverage and drove forward until Plinker went down. Then he was on his stomach, struggling for position, and Johnny was on top, forcing Plinker’s shoulder down for the roll.

“That’s it, Johnny!” Dad screamed, his voice hoarse. “Drive, drive, drive!”

Plinker tried to work his way up, but Johnny wasn’t giving an inch. It was the beginning of the end, a battle Johnny was not going to lose. He was simply stronger. Johnny wanted this. Every muscle in his body was straining...and just like that, Plinker collapsed on his back, his shoulders down.

The ref smacked his hand on the mat, and everyone around us screamed. The Ships went crazy, jumping up and down. Hands reached out, slapping Coach on the back. In the stands, Dad was suddenly mobbed by Ships fans.