Eddie's Bastard Page 10

  “Wow,” I said.

  “You ever done it?”

  “What?”

  “Stick your dick in another guy’s butthole?”

  Suddenly an image came to me. I thought I understood what a dick was then.

  “No,” I said. “You?”

  Trevor shrugged and put out his cigarette. “There’s other stuff you can do.”

  There’s more? I thought. “Like what?”

  “You put some guy’s dick in your mouth and suck on it.”

  “Why do you do that?”

  Trevor rolled his eyes. “You’re an idiot,” he said.

  “No I’m not!”

  “Yes you are. You go around to enough homes and some guy’ll make you do it to him. Just you wait.”

  “I’m not going anywhere else. After this one I’m going back home. Mrs. Wheeler said.”

  “Wheeler don’t know shit. You’re staying here for the rest of your life.”

  “No I’m not!” A small sob escaped me.

  “Look at you,” said Trevor. “What a baby. You’re gonna cry. That’s how much of a baby you are.”

  “I am not!” But my lower lip was trembling, and my eyes filled with water.

  “Jesus, what a baby. You’re gonna be here forever, suckin’ farmer dick. Your grandpa’s dead and so’s your mama. They just don’t want to tell you ’cause they know you’re gonna cry. See? There you go. You’re cryin’.”

  “Shut up!” I screamed, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on top of him and beating the sides of his head with my mittened fists. I’d forgotten that he was older than me, that I’d wanted to be his friend. I wanted to kill him. Rage filled my tiny body until I felt it pulsing through me like a stream of Olympian lightning, and for the second time in two days I felt the ancient Celtic lust for war, or perhaps the utter disregard for death, that runs in the Mann blood.

  Trevor scrambled out from under me and ran backward, crabwise, on his hands and feet. I chased him out from behind the barn and toward the house. He regained his balance, turned, and ran directly into Mrs. Shumacher, who had heard his screaming and my yelling and come running from the porch. Mrs. Shumacher had over twenty years’ experience in breaking up fights between small boys and was utterly indifferent to their causes. She wasted no time interrogating us. She wrapped one meaty fist around Trevor’s neck, grabbed me by the scruff with the other, and brought our foreheads together smartly. It was a precision blow, and if I close my eyes I can still feel it today. I’m sure Trevor can too, wherever he is.

  “No fighting,” she said simply. She dragged us through the field of stars that had suddenly swum into my vision and into the bathroom, where she pressed cool washcloths to the lumps already forming on our foreheads. We were stunned into silence. My head hurt too much even to cry. “No fighting,” she said again.

  It was nearly time for lunch then, so dizzily, and under Mrs. Shumacher’s direction, we washed our hands and went into the kitchen. The rest of the family reappeared soon after—Marky, a fleshy, apple-cheeked boy of twelve, easily twice my weight; Jan and Hans, eighteen-year-old twins who laughed nostalgically when they saw our knotted foreheads; two daughters, Elsa and Hildy, whose bosoms were enormous like their mother’s, and who were always laughing about something secret; and then Mr. Shumacher himself, the biggest of all the Shumachers, his magnificent mustache a twin tapestry, his chest as thick as a horse’s, and a broad, weathered face permanently reddened by cold and heat and always creased in a jolly smile. Amos, the eldest child, was the last to arrive. He looked exactly like his father except that he was slightly smaller and had no mustache.

  The family sat at the long kitchen table, with Mr. Shumacher at one end and Mrs. Shumacher at the other, the eight of us arranged in between according to age. Mrs. Shumacher had begun cooking lunch almost immediately after cleaning up the breakfast dishes; she ran the kitchen with startling efficiency, and it never seemed to be dirty even when production was in full swing. The amount of food she created for each meal would have kept Grandpa and me in leftovers for a month; lunch made breakfast look like a kindergarten snack. There were platters upon platters of food, as if they hadn’t eaten the hugest breakfast I’d ever seen five hours earlier: fritters, scrapple, spicy sausage that Mr. Shumacher made in his barn, ham sandwiches of homemade bread and slabs of ham as thick as my palm, homemade butter on those sandwiches, pitchers of milk, water, and apple juice, a large bowl in which I could comfortably have seated myself, filled to overflowing with potato chips. Mr. Shumacher brewed beer in the basement, and he and Amos Junior each helped themselves to a large stein of it, thick and dark with a soft brown foam. But first we prayed.

  I learned by watching that praying consisted of ducking your head and acting embarrassed while Mrs. Shumacher intoned something out loud in German to someone who wasn’t in the room. Later I was told it was God she was addressing—or “Gott,” as she called him—and that sometimes he answered her, but that nobody else could hear him when he did. Whenever she had a problem on her mind, she would ask Gott, in front of the entire family, what to do about it. Today she said, “Dear Gott! Today two boys have been fighting. They also yelled and cursed. They are visitors here and won’t be here long. What should I do?”

  She was silent now, listening carefully to Gott’s instructions and nodding her head from time to time. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Yah. Okay.”

  The rest of the family dared not breathe. It was not often that Mrs. Shumacher decided to interrupt her regular prayer with a personal request, and to interfere with these conversations was considered a sin worse than murder.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “That’s what I’ll do then.” And she lifted her head and said, “Amen.”

  “Amen,” said everyone else.

  I was horrified. So was Trevor. We looked at each other with wide eyes, wondering what would happen to us. Gott, it seemed, had seen everything, and hadn’t liked it one bit. There was no doubt in my mind he knew we’d been smoking, too. I resigned myself to fate. Jail, I knew, was probably too good for the likes of me. Maybe Trevor was right—I wouldn’t be allowed to go home after all. But Mr. Shumacher winked at me when nobody else was looking. With that simple dip of his eyelid, he communicated to me a thousand pardons, and the fear of Gott left my body and was replaced by hunger.

  Then we ate. I watched in awe as these huge bellowing, snorting giants consumed food as if they’d never been fed before. The Shumacher body, I was learning, was a mighty machine in need of constant refueling. When I first saw on television those military jet planes that are able to refuel in midair, I thought immediately of the Shumachers. They would have benefited enormously from this method of eating while they worked except that it would have deprived them of the opportunity to talk to each other, which they did unceasingly as they ate. Mealtimes were the high points of their day. They shouted, laughed, cried, belched, clacked, slurped, smacked, and snorted. Most of the time I was too busy listening and watching to eat. I’d never imagined there could be such a thing as a Shumacher.

  Days on the farm were extremely predictable. Even though Trevor and I were not expected to work—I because I was too young, Trevor because he was too bad—we were awakened at the same time as the rest of the family, long before sunrise.

  The Mr. and Mrs. called each other Fatti and Mutti—German for “Dad” and “Mom”—and insisted that Trevor and I do the same; Trevor irreverently translated these names into Fatty and Muddy. Each morning, Mutti came into the room I shared with Trevor and the twins, clapping her hands and shouting, “Yah! This is a good time to get up!” So we got up. We formed a line outside the bathroom, the door of which remained open while we urinated in turn so that other members of the family could come in and out as needed. Life as a Shumacher included dealing on a regular basis with the facts of animal reproduction, and this translated into their daily affairs as a complete lack of modesty; the girls tittered at our morning erections as they came in and brushed their teeth, and
it was at the Shumacher farm that I first saw a woman’s breasts. They were Mutti’s, stupendously large, and they swayed and jiggled violently like two live things as she brushed her teeth. I was embarrassed, thinking that I’d intruded upon some secret ritual, but she only laughed at me and gently closed the bathroom door.

  Then we went downstairs in our long underwear to dress in front of the wood stove—the only source of heat in the large old house. Fatti generally appeared around this time, emerging from the subarctic wasteland that is New York in winter like a floundering polar bear, his eyes lighting up at seeing us out of bed. “Yah!” he shouted. “This is a good time to get up!” That, it seemed, was the basic Shumacher philosophy concerning mornings.

  The first thing that needed to be done each morning was the milking of the cows. The cows were milked twice a day, regardless of mood, weather, or illness. Fatti had invested in an electric milking system of which he was fiercely proud. After the cows had been herded into their stalls, he and I and the other boys—except for Trevor, who wasn’t interested in anything—stood around and watched as the milker sucked away in mechanical gasps and spurts at the swollen udders. The cows themselves swayed gently back and forth as they chewed their cud. The milker had only been there six months and it was still referred to as new. “You see that?” Fatti said, every morning. “That’s progress. That sucks ’em dry in ten, maybe fifteen minutes.” Everyone else already knew that, but they never tired of hearing it again, and it had to be said for my benefit. My visit to the milking barn put Fatti into seventh heaven. He had an excuse to launch into an endless lecture on the workings of the electric milker, which he did by showing me every tube and orifice of it, some of them twice. He substituted German terms when English did not suffice. That didn’t matter, since I understood none of what he was saying, but I was happy because he was happy. I listened to him rambling, nodded at the appropriate times while he rested his hand on my shoulder, and a warm glow crept over me and settled at the base of my spine like a cat curling up to take a nap.

  I avoided Trevor after that first morning. He was what Grandpa would have called white trash; not because he was poor, but because he was ignorant and mean, like Mr. Simpson. The Shumachers weren’t poor, but they weren’t rich either. I knew they weren’t trashy at all. Grandpa would have called them “solid folks” or “salt of the earth” because they worked hard and expected nothing for free. I saw the difference clearly, but I don’t think Trevor did. He seemed to hate the Shumachers. He didn’t respond when spoken to, he sat sullenly and kicked at the table leg during mealtimes, and he merely snorted in derision when one of them tried to involve him in conversation.

  I was afraid of Trevor. His stories of strange men making him do awful things had the opposite effect on me from what he intended. Far from being impressed, I was appalled, and because of that, and also because of our fight, I wanted nothing more to do with him. I rambled through the woods alone, as I was used to doing. The Shumachers lived in Eden Township, next to Mannville, and the woods were familiar; same clear cold smell of trees, denuded and dormant, and the Lake still there, not visible but breathing its wet breath gently upon everything. The ice was starting to thaw. The sun shone again and warmed the mirrors that covered the world, and they dripped slowly away into the earth, as in a Dali painting, and were gone. I played my old imaginary games with my father and looked halfheartedly for Munchkins, but it wasn’t any fun without Grandpa’s imagination to help me along. Instead I climbed about in the hayloft and made a fort of the massive bales stacked there. Sometimes I spied on Trevor.

  Trevor mostly sat behind the barn, staring out at nothing, smoking an occasional cigarette. Being beaten by a younger boy was a humiliation he felt keenly. He had withdrawn completely and spoke to no one. Mutti was worried about him. Hildy, the eldest girl, tried to tickle him once at dinner and he kicked her viciously on the shin, raising a large knot. The next day Mrs. Wheeler came in her long red car and sat in the kitchen talking with Mutti and Fatti. She smoked thin brown cigarettes as they talked, surrounded by a cloud of harsh perfumed smoke, and when she left, Trevor was with her, carrying his small cardboard suitcase. I watched from the hayloft of the barn. He didn’t look back as he got into the car. His face was turned to the window, and though he couldn’t see me, I imagined his set expression was being displayed for me to look at. It wasn’t sad; it was triumphant, as if to say, I told you I’d be moving on soon.

  At night, the nightmares came back to me. I was the girl again, whoever she was, fleeing desperately through the woods in my soft bare feet. The soldiers snarled at me in words that now sounded vaguely familiar. I screamed for Mutti and Fatti in my high girl’s voice and hoped they would appear from behind the trees to save me, but they never did, and the dream always ended in the same way: me lying on my back, one heavy booted foot planted on my chest as the sword came flashing down and all went dark. I awoke every night with my head in Mutti’s lap, her thick hands caressing my head. “Shah, shah,” she whispered over and over, until my cries diminished and I grew sleepy again. I was aware of Fatti standing nearby, in the doorway perhaps, watching in confusion, trying to fathom what ancient demons could haunt a boy so young. If I’d had the words, I would have explained to him that they weren’t just my demons; it was an old dream, and all of us Manns had it—Grandpa had told me so. But it wouldn’t have made any sense, because I didn’t understand it myself, and it would be many years yet before I discovered the diary of Willie Mann and the whole matter was explained to me in a way that would peel back the layers of dream-consciousness to reveal the truth that lay underneath.

  The next day a new boy arrived. He was only five years old, and he was afraid of everything. His name was Adam. Something horrible had happened to him, but that we knew only from Mrs. Wheeler, because the boy himself couldn’t speak. His vocal cords had been damaged, and when he tried to talk there was only a hoarse squeaking. Fatti told me it was because his stepfather had grabbed him by the throat. Adam was small even for five, and he had a shock of white-blond hair that looked as if it had been cut with the aid of a soup bowl. He was afraid of Fatti, Amos, Marky, Jan and Hans, Mutti, and Elsa. He was also afraid of bowls, knives, bathtubs, dogs, large pieces of wood, and the tractor. But of Hildy and me he was not afraid at all. There seemed to be no logic to his phobias. He held my hand tightly as we walked around the farm together, I showing him all the things I’d become familiar with in the last several days. We looked at the cows as they stood meditatively in their stalls. He wasn’t afraid of them either, although they could have crushed the life out of his tiny body with one careless flick of their hips, and he squeaked excitedly when they looked at him with their large, limpid eyes. I showed him my secret fort in the hayloft, and we played a new game I’d invented, called simply “Vietnam.” This game was played by launching myself from the top of a high stack of hay bales onto a soft landing platform of loose hay. That was me flying my jet fighter, and on my way down I made airplane noises and shot at enemy aircraft. Adam wouldn’t jump, but he watched enthusiastically, squeaking as I flew. He became my shadow. When someone besides Hildy wanted to tell Adam something, they had to do it through me. He sat next to me at the table and ate whatever I ate. If I went to the bathroom, he sat outside the door and waited until I came out again; his eyes, blue and large and panicked, would resolve themselves into puddles of relief when I reappeared. At night he crawled into bed with me and snuggled up under my arm, where he stayed until Fatti came in to take me to the bathroom, and gently hoisted him out of my bed and into his own.

  One night I awoke from the nightmare to find Fatti standing over me, watching silently. When he was perturbed about something, he twirled his pendulous mustache with his fingers. He did this now. When he saw that I was awake he kneeled next to the bed.

  “What were you dreaming?”

  “Soldiers,” I said. “Chasing me.”

  “What soldiers?”

  “I don’t know.”

  �
�What do they do?”

  “Kill me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said again. “I did something wrong.”

  “Nah,” said Fatti. “You’re a good boy.”

  “They think I’m bad.”

  “Why do you speak German when you’re sleeping?”

  “What?”

  “German,” said Fatti. “You speak German almost every night. But when you’re awake you don’t know German.”

  “You speak German,” I said.

  “Yah. But not you.”

  “The soldiers speak German.”

  “They from the war?”

  “I don’t know. What war?”

  “The world war.”

  I knew a little about the Second World War from Grandpa’s stories. I shook my head. “Different,” I said. “They chase me and I trip over my dress and they cut off my head.”

  “You trip over your what?”

  “Dress,” I said. “I dream I’m a girl and they’re chasing me.”

  Fatti pondered this in silence. I could see his massive bulk outlined against the moonlight, which glinted off the snow.

  “A girl?” he said finally. “What kind of uniform do they wear?”

  “Green,” I said. “With big pointy hats.”

  “What do they tell you?”

  “To stop. To halte.”

  “What’s your name in this dream? You know?”

  I thought for a moment. I didn’t know for sure, so I said the first girl’s name that popped into my head. “Mary.”

  Fatti nodded. That seemed to settle something for him. I got out of bed, and he took me to the bathroom so I wouldn’t pee in the bed again, which I hadn’t done since that first night anyway—it was just a precautionary measure. Then he tucked me back in and planted a loud wet kiss on my forehead. From his bed across the room, Adam gave a tiny whimper, engrossed in some nightmare of his own. Jan rolled over in the bed he shared with Hans and smacked him on the forehead with his arm. “Strudelkopf,” said Hans in his sleep.