Eddie's Bastard Page 38

  “On the way to Buffalo, Willie happened to meet up with his aunt and uncle, who were coming back from some trip or other. They used to go to revival meetings, which were big back in those days. If a famous preacher got within fifty miles, Willie’s aunt was there to see him, and more often than not she dragged her husband and son along with her. Her name was Elspeth. She was, if I remember correctly, kind of the hysterical type. She liked to faint a lot. Not for real, but just to get attention. Fainting was very fashionable back then. All the fancy city ladies did it. They even had special fainting couches in their houses, and whenever something exciting or scary or just plain unpleasant happened, well, down they went. Willie’s Aunt Elspeth was just that kind of lady, although her fainting was kind of misplaced, seeing as how farm women didn’t do that sort of thing, and Elspeth was, above all, a farm woman.

  “So Willie stopped to talk with them. Young Frederic, their son, was with them. He was twelve that year. He and Willie were best friends, and they did everything together. It was no accident Willie had chosen to leave town while Frederic was away with his parents, because he knew he would have a hell of a time saying good-bye to them, and like as not Frederic would want to come along with him. As it turned out, that was exactly what Frederic tried to pull, too. He put up a hell of a fuss when he found out Willie was going somewhere without him. I imagine there must have been quite a scene there on the road, actually, what with Willie’s auntie fainting all over the place and Frederic bawling like a calf. But it was out of the question for Frederic to go with him. That went without saying. He was too young. Willie himself was just barely old enough to heft that old gun, and he was already afraid the Army would turn him back once he got to Buffalo.

  “So he kept on his way, and his aunt and uncle and Frederic kept on theirs, and Willie camped the first night in a stand of trees along the road. There was a lot more forest in those days, and you could camp wherever you wanted, pretty much. He was lying awake that night, already homesick as hell, feet sore, arms aching, hungry, tired, and starting to get scared, when all of a sudden he hears this noise coming from the road. It was a voice, calling something over and over. Willie had already worked himself up to such a frenzy about the Rebels that he figured they’d somehow got wind of his presence and sent a spy out to kill him, way up here in New York. He said later he just about wet his pants. He loaded up his gun, and he sat there in the leaves, listening to the voice and trying to see who it was, when suddenly he hears his name. He waits and listens again, and sure enough, it comes again. Whoever it is, he knows Willie. And then it comes to him—it’s Frederic. The little rat had sneaked off from his parents and set out to find his cousin, and as chance would have it, he found him.

  “Well, to hear Willie tell it, he didn’t know whether to hug him or shoot him. He knew there was going to be a hell of a fuss when Frederic’s parents found out he was gone, and an even bigger one when they realized where it was he’d gone off to. Willie tried to get him to turn around and go home, but of course Frederic wouldn’t do it. He was bound and determined to become a soldier himself and head down South to ‘whup Rebs.’

  “Willie said later that what he should have done was just turn around the next morning and head back to town with Frederic in tow, tie the little bastard to a tree to keep him from following, and start his trip all over again. But for one reason or another he didn’t do it. Later on he wished he had, of course, but by then it was too late. He was young, too young to think responsibly for the sake of others—he was just learning how to take care of himself. And he was glad of the company, because lying there all alone that first night he found out real quick he wasn’t near as tough as he thought he was, and half of him was scared to death, and the other half was almost crazy with loneliness and homesickness.

  “So to make a long story short, Willie and Frederic went to Buffalo and joined up. The Army didn’t want to take Frederic, of course, but the boys lied and wheedled and whined, and finally they signed him on as a drummer boy. In those days nobody had any papers, and it was possible to lie about your age with no trouble at all. So they sign up, they get fancy new uniforms, they learn how to drill in formation, all the rest of it. They spent a month or so in camp and then they marched down South.

  “Now on this march there was another soldier named Ferguson. A lot of the Irish liked to stick together, but Ferguson was a nasty son of a bitch, the kind of Irishman who made other Irishmen look bad, and the other soldiers didn’t like him. He was drunk all the time, lazy, foul-smelling, and a bully. He was a big fellow, too, and he liked to push the smaller guys around. They had chores to do every night on the march when they made camp—one guy went for wood, another guy for water, so on and so on. You generally camped each night in groups of six or seven guys. Ferguson was in the same group as Willie and Frederic. He never wanted to go for wood when it was his turn, and if he was feeling particularly mean that day he would make some other poor slob do it for him. It happened to Willie a few times. Ferguson was too big for Willie to fight, and you didn’t complain about things like that to your officers. So you either beat the hell out of the guy and settled it that way, or you put up with it. Willie chose to put up with it.

  “That is, until one night when they were camped somewhere in southern Pennsylvania. It was Ferguson’s turn to go for wood, and of course he didn’t want to go, and he decided he was going to get someone else to do it for him. Instead of Willie, though, this time he picked on Frederic. Willie was small, but Frederic was even smaller, being only twelve. And to top it all off, Ferguson started smacking the boy around. Well, that was all Willie could take. He lit into Ferguson like a bobcat, and next thing you know, Ferguson is dead, and Willie gets taken off to jail.”

  “Dead?” I interrupted.

  “As a doornail,” Grandpa said.

  “Willie killed him?”

  “Stabbed him to death, with a big old hunting knife he carried. Said he didn’t even remember doing it. The whole world just went red, and next thing he knew he was in prison, with chains around his neck and his legs.”

  I shuddered. I knew what it felt like to have the whole world go red. It had happened to me when I attacked David Weismueller. So the spirit of the Celtic warrior had lived within my great-great-grandfather too. That was where he came from. He was an heirloom, like the nightmare of Mary Rory.

  “Anyway,” said Grandpa, “Willie spent the rest of the war in jail. They talked about hanging him, but I guess their hearts weren’t in it. Willie got the chance to explain himself in court, and some other fellows spoke up about the kind of man Ferguson was, and how they were surprised nobody had killed him sooner, what with the way he treated everybody. But they couldn’t very well let him go free either. So he spent the next four years in a jail cell. With a schoolteacher, as it turned out—that was how he learned to read and write.”

  “And what happened to Frederic?”

  “Frederic,” said my grandfather. His face grew dark. “Well, Frederic got killed.”

  “In battle?”

  “Yeah. Antietam. Willie didn’t know that, of course. In those days you rarely got notified of anything, and he wouldn’t have heard anyway, because he was in jail. Back then, if you got killed, your family didn’t get a letter from the government explaining everything. You just didn’t come home after the war. By and by, when you didn’t show up, your people just kind of figured it out. And that was what happened when Frederic didn’t come home.

  “Now there had always been this sort of unspoken bond between Willie and Frederic’s parents. They trusted him with their boy, but they made it plain every time they went off hunting or fishing or swimming that they held Willie responsible for Frederic’s well-being, him being the older of the two, and Willie took it to heart. He always did his best to keep the boy out of trouble. But war is a different thing altogether. Willie knew there was no way he could keep Frederic safe on a battlefield. And then, of course, while he was in prison, he didn’t even know where Fred
eric was. Neither of them could write yet, so they couldn’t send letters to each other. Willie got out of prison on the very day the treaty was signed, and he spent a few months hunting around for Frederic. Finally he managed to find some fellows from his old regiment, and they told him Frederic was dead. So Willie gave up and headed home without him.

  “Willie hadn’t been home in four years. In all that time, nobody back here had heard a word from either of the boys. So Willie’s parents were overjoyed, of course, to see their son back safe and sound, if a mite silent. Of course, Willie didn’t want to tell them where he’d really been, so he acted like he’d been through one battle too many and he didn’t ever want to discuss it. His parents never knew that he’d never fought in any battles at all.”

  “What about his leg?” I interrupted. “His wounded leg?”

  “Some farmer took a shot at him as Willie was stealing one of his chickens,” Grandpa said. “Hit him in the thigh. That was the only time Willie ever came under fire in the whole war. And Frederic’s parents never knew the boys hadn’t been together either. They thought Willie and Frederic had been side by side the whole time, and they couldn’t understand why Willie hadn’t brought the boy back home. Well, Frederic’s father kind of understood. And he knew also that there was nothing Willie could have done to save the boy in the middle of the fighting, even though there hadn’t been any fighting for Willie. But Elspeth never forgave him. You know how parents are when it comes to their children. They just get crazy if they see them getting hurt or something, and if the child happens to be killed, why they can easily go around the bend altogether. I know. It happened to me.

  “When Willie got home, the first thing he did was limp on up to his aunt and uncle’s place. He didn’t want to do it, he said, but he knew if he didn’t go right away he never would. When Elspeth saw Willie come walking up the road to their house alone, she was too worked up even to throw one of her fainting fits. She’d been steadily losing her mind ever since Frederic ran off, and when she understood that he was really dead, that he wasn’t coming home, she lost it completely. She let loose with a curse on Willie and all the Manns. Not something simple like ‘Damn you.’ I mean a real old-fashioned curse, like people used to lay on each other around here when they believed in those kinds of things. She went on and on at him for about an hour, calling down all kinds of horrendous things on his head. Willie just stood by the gate and took it. When she was done, he turned around and went home. Soon after that, he found all that money, and he tried to give some to Frederic’s parents, but Elspeth wouldn’t take it. She forbade any further contact between the Manns and the Simpsons, and she poisoned the minds of all her relations against us. And soon after that, the Simpsons started to die off. It was like her curse had backfired on her. They died of the flu, mostly, which in those days still killed people. Measles too. Soon there were only a few left. And now they’re all gone.”

  Grandpa heaved a deep sigh of relief.

  “I thought for a while that we were done for too,” he said. He looked at me. “But then you came along.” He grinned. “Thank God for that.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” I said.

  “It’s a hard story to tell,” said Grandpa. “But I guess it doesn’t seem that bad, now it’s out. Willie never came out and told me this himself, you know. He put it all in the diary, and he gave me that, but I never got around to reading it until I was on that damn island. I never got the chance to talk to him about it. Every once in a while, after he gave it to me but before I left for the war, he’d say, ‘You read that diary yet?’ And I’d say, ‘Not yet, Papa Willie.’ And he’d say, real casual, ‘Well, let me know when you get around to it.’ Jesus. I wish—well, never mind what I wish. It’s too late for me to be rewriting history. You help me upstairs and put me in my bed now,” said Grandpa. “All this talking has worn me out.”

  Two more months passed, and the end of the school year grew tantalizingly closer. With it would come my graduation and my liberation from high school, and I would be free to search for my mother. But first I needed to know where to look, and I’d heard nothing further from the Air Force. I spent my days in a frenzy of restlessness.

  I finally heard from Annie. She mailed me the picnic basket in which I’d been delivered to Grandpa, and which I’d mistakenly left in Montreal so long ago. Inside the basket were several copies of a French magazine. The cover of it seemed familiar, and I looked at it for several moments, trying to place it. Then it hit me—it was Le Journal des Lettres, the Montreal magazine for which I’d asked Annie to translate my story.

  “Dear Billy,” she wrote:

  I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch for so long. I don’t think I need to explain. I never have, with you. You understand. Please keep trying to understand. Please never change that about you.

  I finally finished the translation, and guess what? They took it! They didn’t offer any money, of course, but they did send me ten free copies. I kept two and sent you the rest. This is sort of a triumph for both of us, I guess. Congratulations!

  So I was finally published—in a language I couldn’t read. It was a triumph, all right. A bittersweet one, but a triumph nonetheless.

  And my suspicions about where I stood with Annie were confirmed. “Please keep trying to understand,” she’d written. In our secret way of speaking to each other, that meant “Please keep leaving me alone. Someday maybe things will be different, but not right now.”

  In the meantime, Grandpa grew paler. No, not paler—yellower. His skin turned the shade of a maple leaf in autumn. His liver began to wind down, refusing to process the toxins that his body naturally produced. He’d made it do too much work for too long, he said, and now it was out of juice, or whatever it was that made it run. Grandpa’s understanding of the human body was intimately linked with his automotive expertise. It was in these terms that he’d once explained to me the mechanics of sex, in the parlance of crankshafts and piston wells, oil and combustion, and he saw himself now as a machine that had been driven too long without the proper maintenance; his body was about to commit the human equivalent of throwing a rod, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  Mildred, who was about to lose the second man in her life—but as she said, in many ways really her first—showed little or no emotion at Grandpa’s imminent passing. At least not in front of us, she didn’t. But passing by her room, through the closed door I could sometimes hear her sobbing out her secret pain. I would pause in the hallway, wondering what a life like hers must have been like. I was born already having lost everything, but Mildred…Mildred had built up an entire life and then watched it dwindle away through the bottom of a glass. Kind of like Grandpa, I guess.

  Mildred was a practical woman, all business when necessary—she’d been raised in a time before women had the luxury of questioning their position, when they were expected to handle certain situations on their own. A man’s death was one of those situations, something for which one rarely had the chance to prepare, so despite her emotion she couldn’t pass up this opportunity to take advantage of the notice she’d been given and in this way feel that she was, perhaps, thumbing her nose at the specter of mortality. She cleaned the entire house again, scrubbing it from top to bottom with a vigor that shamed my previous efforts. She forced Grandpa to choose the suit he would wear in his coffin. When he fought her on this point, saying he didn’t care what he wore and would just as soon go to the next life naked, she refused to accept his obstinacy.

  “You can’t just lay there in your birthday suit, now can you?” she said. When Mildred spoke to my grandfather, her eyes sparked in a way that said she loved him and that she would put up with no resistance. To look at her then, you wouldn’t know she’d ever shed a tear in her life.

  “I came into this world naked,” said Grandpa, “didn’t I? So I guess I can damn well go out of it naked.”

  “You mind your mouth. Nobody gets buried naked. What would people say?”

  “Ha!
They can’t say anything about me they haven’t said already.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Mildred.

  “We’re born naked, wet, and hungry,” observed Grandpa to me. “And things just get worse from there. You like that? I read it on a bumper sticker.”

  “You pick a suit right now,” she said, “or you’re going to be leaving this world a lot sooner than you think.”

  “When you get married, Billy, pick a woman like this,” said Grandpa, his eyes twinkling. “One with some life to her.”

  “And don’t be afraid to die,” said Mildred. “Not like your grandfather.”

  Grandpa’s eyes grew wide in hurt amazement. He opened his mouth, and I thought he was going to yell. Instead, however, he laughed a long, loud laugh at himself, because of course Mildred was right. He didn’t want to choose a burial suit because it forced him to imagine how he would look in his coffin.

  When those words were out, words that only Mildred could get away with, all pretense was dropped. Grandpa meekly chose an old black tuxedo, which he had last worn as a young man eagerly awaiting the arrival of his ostriches from far-off Australia. He was unable to get out of bed now. I held up his tuxedo for him so he could examine it from his pillow.

  “God, I feel like shit,” he confided in me when we were alone. It was the only time I heard him complain. “I must look like shit too.”

  “You don’t look too bad,” I lied.

  “Ha. I bet I look like I’m already dead.”

  I could say nothing to that, but the truth is he was right. He looked more like a corpse than a living man, and his room had already taken on the smell of death. The feeling in my chest was worsening by the day. I was afraid to go to school for fear he would slip off while I was gone and I would miss his departure; at the same time I was terrified of witnessing it. I had seen the death of Levi Miller’s wife, and also the passing of Annie’s father. They had been horrible, bloody, dramatic endings. I had no wish to see another.