This Boy's Life (26 page)

We stood up and shook hands. Mr. Bolger made it clear that he did not want to lord this over us. He wanted to put the whole thing behind him, the sooner the better. Mrs. Bolger did not get up. I could see that she was still feeling the wrong of what we had done, though I did not feel it myself.

 

CHUCK AND
I
loaded up the cans and drove them over to the Welch farm. It wasn’t that far through the fields, but to get there by car we had to drive up to the main road and then turn off on a winding, unpaved track still muddy from yesterday’s rain. Chuck went fast so we wouldn’t get stuck. The mud pounded against the floor of the car. We passed through scrub pine that opened up here and there to show a house or a clearing with some cows in it. Chuck swore a blue streak the whole way.

We pulled into the Welches’ drive and sat there a moment, silent, before we got out.

I had worked on several farms during my summer vacations, picking and haying. These farms were in the upper valley near Marblemount. close but not too close to the river, with good drainage and rich soil. The owners prospered. They had up-to-date equipment, and kept their houses and barns painted. Their yards were grassy, trimmed with flower beds and decorated with birdbaths and wagon wheels and big ceramic squirrels.

The Welch farmyard was all mud, a wallow without hogs. Nothing grew there. And nothing moved, no cats, no chickens, no mutts running out to challenge us. The house was small, ash gray and decrepit. Moss grew thickly on the shingle roof. There was no porch, but a tarpaulin had been stretched from one wall to give shelter to a washtub with a mangle and a clothesline that drooped with dull flannel shirts of different sizes, and dismal sheets.

Smoke rose from a stovepipe. It was surprising to look up and see that the sky was blue and fresh.

Chuck knocked. A woman opened the door and stood in the doorway, a little girl behind her. Both of them were red-haired and thin. The little girl smiled at Chuck. Chuck smiled sadly back at her.

“I was surprised,” the woman said. “I have to say I was surprised.”

“I’m sorry,” Chuck said. He made the abashed face he’d been wearing in the kitchen that morning.

“I wouldn’t have never thought it of you,” she said. She looked at me, then turned back to Chuck. “You say you’re sorry. Well, so am I. So is Mr. Welch. It’s just not what we ever expected.”

Mrs. Welch told us where to find her husband. As we slogged through the mud, the fuel cans swinging at our sides, Chuck said, “Shit, shit, shit ...”

Mr. Welch was sitting on a pile of wood, watching Jack and one of the other Welch boys. They were a little ways off, taking turns digging with a post-holer. Mr. Welch was bareheaded. His wispy brown hair floated in the breeze. He had on a new pair of overalls, dark blue and stiff-looking and coated with mud around the ankles. We came up to him and set the cans down. He looked at them, then looked back at his sons. They kept an eye on us as they worked, not with any menace, but just to see what was going to happen. I could hear the post-holer slurping up the mud with the same sound our shoes had made the night before. Chuck waved at them and they both nodded.

We looked at them for a time. Then Chuck went to Mr. Welch’s side and began to talk in a low voice, telling him how sorry he was for what we had done. He offered no explanations and did not mention that we had been drinking. His manner was weightily sincere, almost tragical.

Mr. Welch watched his sons. He did not speak. When Chuck was through, Mr. Welch turned and looked at us, and I could see from the slow and effortful way he moved that the idea of looking at us was misery to him. His cheeks were stubbled and sunken in. He had spots of mud on his face. His brown eyes were blurred, as if he’d been crying or was about to cry.

I didn’t need to see the tears in Mr. Welch’s eyes to know that I had brought shame on myself. I knew it when we first drove into the farmyard and I saw the place in the light of day. Everything I saw thereafter forced the knowledge in deeper. These people weren’t making it. They were near the edge, and I had nudged them that much farther along. Not much, but enough to take away some of their margin. Returning the gas didn’t change that. The real harm was in their knowing that someone could come upon them in this state, and pause to do them injury. It had to make them feel small and alone, knowing this—that was the harm we had done. I understood some of this and felt the rest.

The Welch farm seemed familiar to me. It wasn’t just the resemblance between their house and the house where I’d lived in Seattle, it was the whole vision, the house, the mud, the stillness, the boys lifting and dropping the post-holer. I recognized it from some idea of failure that had found its perfect enactment here.

Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out—a fence there could serve no purpose. Their work was pointless. Years later, while I was waiting for a boat to take me across a river, I watched two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks. They did it for a good long while, and were still doing it when I crossed the river. They were part of the dream from which I recognized the Welches, my defeat-dream, my damnation-dream, with its solemn choreography of earnest useless acts.

It takes a childish or corrupt imagination to make symbols of other people. I didn’t know the Welches. I had no right to see them this way. I had no right to feel fear or pity or disgust, no right to feel anything but sorry for what I had done. I did feel these things, though. A kind of panic came over me. I couldn’t take a good breath. All I wanted was to get away.

Mr. Welch had said something to Chuck, something I could not hear, and Chuck had stepped aside. I understood that his apology had been accepted. Mr. Welch was waiting for mine, and the attitude of his waiting told me that this business was hard on him. It was time to get it over with. But I stayed where I was, watching the Welch boys pull up mud. I could not make myself move or speak. Just to stand there was all I could do. When Chuck realized I wasn’t going to say anything, he murmured good-bye and shook Mr. Welch’s hand. I followed him to the car without looking back.

 

MR. BOLGER KNOCKED on our door when we got home. That small courtesy was full of promise, and when he came in I saw that he was eager to be forgiving. It made me sad, being so close to his pardon and knowing I couldn’t have it. He nodded at us and said, “How did it go?”

Chuck didn’t answer. He had not spoken to me since we left the Welch place. I knew he despised me for not apologizing, but I had no way of explaining my feelings to him, or even to myself. I believed that there was no difference between explanations and excuses, and that excuses were unmanly. So were feelings, especially complicated feelings. I didn’t admit to them. I hardly knew I had them.

Chuck surrounded himself with silence. We were close to our breaking point. I couldn’t keep up with him in debauchery, and now I had failed him in repentance as well.

Mr. Bolger looked at me when he got no answer from Chuck.

“Chuck apologized,” I said. “I didn’t.”

Mr. Bolger asked Chuck to leave us alone, and sat down on the other bed when Chuck had gone. With a show of patience, he tried to understand why I had not apologized. All I was able to say was that I couldn’t.

He asked for more.

“I wanted to,” I said. “I just couldn’t.”

“You agreed that you owed the Welches an apology.”

“Yes sir.”

“You promised to apologize, Jack. You gave your word.”

I said again that I wanted to but couldn’t.

Mr. Bolger lost interest in me then. I saw it in his eyes. He told me that he and Mrs. Bolger had hoped I would be happy with them, happier than I’d apparently been with my stepfather, but it didn’t seem as if I was. All in all, he saw no point in my staying on. He said he would call my mother that night and make arrangements to have her come and get me. I didn’t argue. I knew that his mind was made up.

So was mine. I had decided to join the army.

 

MY MOTHER DROVE down the next day. She huddled with the Bolgers for a couple of hours, then took me for a drive. At first she didn’t speak. Her hands were clenched tight on the steering wheel; the muscles of her jaw were tensed. We went down the road a few miles, to a truck stop. My mother pulled into the parking lot and turned off the engine.

“I had to beg them,” she said.

Then she told me what her begging had accomplished. Mr. Bolger had agreed to let me stay on after all, if I would put things right with the Welches by working on their farm after school.

I said I would rather not do that.

She ignored me. Looking over the steering wheel, she said that Mr. Bolger also wanted Father Karl to have a talk with me. Mr. Bolger hoped that Father Karl’s brand of religion might reach me, being closer to the one I was raised in than his own. My mother said I had a couple of choices: I could either go along with Mr. Bolger or pack up. Today. And if I did paok up, I’d better have a plan, because I couldn’t come home with her—Dwight wouldn’t let me in the door. It looked like she might have a job lined up in Seattle but it would be a while until she knew for sure, and then she would need time to get started and find a place.

“Why didn’t you apologize to those people?” she said.

I told her I couldn’t.

She looked at me, then stared through the windshield again. She had never been so far away. If I had robbed a bank she would have stuck by me, but not for this. She said, “So what are you going to do.” She didn’t sound especially interested.

I told her I would do whatever the Bolgers wanted.

She started the car and took me back. After letting me out she drove away fast.

 

MR. BOLGER WAS too busy that week to arrange my service with the Welches, but I did not know that. I came into the store after school each day expecting to be told to go back outside and get in the car. I came in, and hesitated, and when no one said anything I walked lightly into the back room and put my apron on and began to do my chores. Chuck and I used to work together, talking, joking around, snapping dust cloths and goosing each other with broom handles. Now we worked by ourselves, in silence. I dreamed. Sometimes I thought of the Welch farm and of myself there, drowning in mud, surrounded by accusing faces. Whenever this thought came to me I had to close my eyes and catch a breath.

Toward the end of the week Father Karl came in. He talked to Mr. Bolger in the storeroom for a few minutes, then called me outside. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

We followed a footpath down to the river. Father Karl didn’t say anything until we were at the riverbank. He picked up a rock and threw it into the water. I had the cynical suspicion that he was going to give me the same sermon the chaplain at Scout camp had given to every new group of boys on their first day last summer. He would walk up to the edge of the lake, casually pick up a handful of stones and toss one in. “Only a pebble,” he would say musingly, as if the idea were just occurring to him, “only a pebble, but look at all the ripples it makes, and how far the ripples reach ...” By the end of the summer we camp counselors all held him in open scorn. We called him Ripples.

But Father Karl did not give this sermon. He couldn’t have. He had come by his faith the hard way, and did not speak of it with art or subtlety. His parents were Jewish. They had both been killed in concentration camps, and Father Karl himself barely survived. Sometime after the war he became a convert to Christianity, and then a minister. Some trace of Eastern Europe still clung to his speech. He had dark good looks of which he seemed unaware, and a thoughtful manner that grew sharp when he had to deal with pretense or frivolity. I had felt this sharpness before, and was about to feel it again.

He asked me who I thought I was.

I did not know how to answer this question. I didn’t even try.

“Look at yourself, Jack. What are you doing? Tell me what you think you are doing.”

“I guess I’m screwing up,” I said, giving my head a rueful shake.

“No baloney!” he shouted. “No baloney!”

He looked about ready to hit me. I decided to keep quiet.

“If you go on like this,” he said, “what will happen to you? Answer me!”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. You know.” His voice was softer. “You know.” He picked up another rock and hurled it into the river. “What do you want?”

“sorry?”

“Want! You must want something. What do you want?”

I knew the answer to this question, all right. But I was sure that my answer would enrage him even more, worldly as I knew it to be, and contrary to what I could imagine of his own wants. I could not imagine Father Karl wanting money, a certain array of merchandise, wanting, at any price, the world’s esteem. I could not imagine him wanting anything as much as I wanted these things, or imagine him hearing my wants without contempt.

I had no words for any of this, or for my understanding that to accept Father Karl’s hope of redemption I would have to give up my own. He believed in God, and I believed in the world.

I shrugged off his question. I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted, I said.

He sat down on a log. I hesitated, then sat a little ways down from him and stared across the river. He picked up a stick and prodded the ground with it, then asked me if I wanted to make my mother unhappy.

I said no.

“You don’t?”

I shook my head.

“Well, that’s what you’re doing.”

I said nothing.

“All right, then. Do you want to make her happy?”

“Sure.”

“Good. That’s something. That’s one thing you want. Right?” When I agreed, he said, “But you’re making her unhappy, aren’t you?”