Eddie's Bastard Page 41

  This salvaged the situation, for the three elderly men, their wartime animosities dusty from disuse, immediately embarked on a discussion of the differences between the Japanese Zero and the American P–40. I listened. Soon the women began to talk to each other, their voices cutting through the rumble of their husbands’ as though they weren’t there, and the lilting of their voices gradually soothed my frayed nerves. Exhausted from being up all night, I had to jerk myself awake twice.

  Then there were footsteps behind me, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was a familiar hand, large and heavy and hairy. For a moment, in my waking-dream state, I thought it was Doctor Connor returned from the grave. But an odor assailed my nostrils, rising above the smell of whiskey and candles and incense: manure. Manure and milk. And tobacco. Where had I smelled those before?

  I stood and turned, still half asleep. It was not Doctor Connor, of course. It was Mr. Shumacher. And behind him, ranked in order of age as always, stood Mrs. Shumacher and seven Shumacher children, their round pudgy faces emitting a mixture of excitement and sadness.

  I couldn’t speak. Mr. Shumacher grabbed me by both shoulders and squeezed; he too was hard-pressed for words, it seemed. Mrs. Shumacher came to his rescue by flying past him and taking me to her massive bosom, which seemed, if possible, to have grown even larger. Neither appeared to have aged at all.

  “Gruss Gott,” gasped Mrs. Shumacher. “It’s good to see you, boy.”

  “Yah,” agreed Mr. Shumacher, as if those were exactly the words he’d been searching for. “Good to see you.”

  “Good to see you,” murmured the man behind them. With a start I saw that the man was Amos Junior, now into his thirties and an exact replica of his father, right down to the handlebars depending lazily from his upper lip. He moved forward and pressed my hand in both of his. I watched my fingers disappear for a moment between his massive palms.

  “Good to see you,” said Amos Junior.

  “Good to see you, Amos Junior,” I said. Emotion was choking me and speech was difficult. I had to content myself with shaking his hand as firmly as I could, but the gesture was as absurd as an ant trying to lift a pancake.

  Amos Junior was followed by Jan and Hans, Elsa, Hildy, and Marky, all of whom had turned into clones of their parents. They grabbed me to them as though I was a prodigal brother for whom they had grown tired of waiting. Without looking, I knew that in our driveway there would be parked a Shumacher convoy of two pickup trucks and a sedan. It was a regular family adventure.

  The family filed past me and into the living room, where they went to the coffin and knelt to say prayers. Last in the line of Shumachers stood a kid near my age. He had a shock of fine blond hair cut in the shape of a soup bowl, and large limpid eyes an astonishing shade of blue. He looked uncomfortable in his suit, which was obviously new: someone had forgotten to snip the price tag off his pants. The kid looked down at the floor when he saw me staring at him and fidgeted with his fingers. Mr. Shumacher poked me in the back.

  “He’s shy, but he’s been talking about you all the way here,” he said. “Go say hi to him.”

  I sidled closer to the boy. He would be about sixteen by now, I calculated, but he still looked younger than he was; he probably always would. And by now, after eleven years, he would be a full-fledged Shumacher, if not in physical stature then at least in spirit.

  “Hello, Adam,” I said.

  Adam looked me full in the eye for a long moment. I was transported back to the barn, feeling the crushed hay underfoot again as I played my airplane games while he looked on. His eyes had grown in concert with the rest of him. They were still too big for his body. The overall effect was of looking at someone whose soul was lurking just beneath the surface of his face waiting for the right moment to burst out and shine triumphantly.

  “Hi,” he said. “How you doing?”

  I shrugged. “Okay. How you been?”

  It was his turn to shrug.

  “Pretty good,” he said. His voice was still scratched and high, as though it hadn’t been able to grow with the rest of him. The damage his father had done to his vocal cords was permanent.

  “This is your house, huh?”

  “Yah,” I said. Unconsciously I was slipping back into the Shumacher mode of speech. Adam had adopted it as well.

  “I remember you pretty good,” he said.

  I smiled. “I remember you too,” I said.

  “Yah. Good.”

  We stood there, awkwardly silent.

  “You come by the house sometime,” he said finally. “Visit.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I will.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good.”

  Abruptly Adam headed for Mrs. Shumacher. He sat down next to her and leaned his head on her shoulder. She reached up one hand and stroked his hair as she continued her conversation with Mrs. Greene. Adam looked at me once more, shyly, and finally smiled.

  The house was slowly filling now with people. I recognized all of them, some more than others, from my jaunts around town as an agent of Gruber’s Grocery. The men pressed my hand, the women pecked me on the cheek, all of them muttering words of commiseration and condolence under their breath. Some of them had brought bottles of their own, and deep dishes of food, and these they set on the counter in the kitchen.

  I took advantage of the distraction to down my fourth whiskey. It had a smoky flavor, strong but not harsh, and I felt it racing down my throat like lava, sending a shudder through my body. I had often seen Grandpa give the same shudder when he drank. I’d wondered then why he drank at all if he hated it so much. Now I understood that it was only partly a shudder of distaste. The rest of it was pleasure, sheer delight at the perversion of deflowering oneself in such a manner, and also the convulsive struggle of the human organism against the intensity of the alcohol. Poison it was, surely, but delicious poison, sweet and welcoming, and I felt a certainty that I’d never felt before, a lightheadedness that quickly gave way to hilarious clarity. Suddenly many things I’d never understood were illuminated. Me, my life, growing up in the old farmhouse, Annie, Grandpa—everything made sense in a shrug-of-the-shoulder, what-the-hell kind of way. I was astonished at how easy it all seemed at that moment, how clear the whole matter of my existence was, how simple, how beautiful. I was drunk.

  Willie Mann, in one of his lighter moods, writes of drinking:

  Whiskey makes the old man young—

  he feels his heart beat quickly.

  But whiskey makes him old again

  come morning, when he’s sickly.

  People had given up on ringing the doorbell and were just walking in now. My fears that nobody would attend were diminishing by the moment. Already there were more people in the house than there had been at one time since I was born.

  I noticed then a trio of men who were standing awkwardly off to one side of the gathering. They were all short and slightly built. One of them had flaming red hair. The redhead held a strange bundle of pipes under his arm, and the other two were clutching instrument cases—a fiddle, I surmised from the shape, and something else. I squinted carefully at the men. Their clothing was odd, foreign-looking yet somehow familiar. It reminded me of the old suits we kept in trunks up in the attic. They were the same old-fashioned cut, the same sort of style. The men were so out of place in this clothing that they almost looked to be in costume, and yet nobody else appeared to have noticed them, or if they had, they thought nothing of it.

  The redheaded man saw me looking at them. He nudged his two companions. They approached me slowly, respectfully, with heads bowed.

  “Our condolences to ye in yer time o’ need,” said the redheaded man. He had a thick Irish brogue, his words barely recognizable.

  “Thanks,” I said. I waited for them to introduce themselves, but instead they looked down shyly at the floor.

  “’Tis an Irish wake here, they say,” said the redheaded man presently.

  “’Tis,”
said his companion who was holding the fiddle case.

  “You guys Irish?” I asked. That’s it, I thought; they’re homesick Irishmen.

  “Aye,” said the third, who hadn’t yet spoken. A smile lit his face for an instant and then disappeared as he appeared to remember where he was.

  “You been over here long?”

  “Here?”

  “The States, I mean.”

  “Oh, the States,” said the redheaded man. “Ahh…we’ve been over a good long time, yes.”

  I looked again at their clothes. Perhaps they were Irish clothes, I thought. That would explain it.

  “Well,” I said, feeling the whiskey surging through my blood, “whaddaya got in those cases? And what are all those pipes?”

  “Ah,” said the redheaded man, “we’ve a fiddle and a squeezebox, and these pipes are for makin’ music.”

  “Music,” I said. A flash of intuition lit my inebriated mind. “You guys are musicians!” I said brightly.

  “We are,” said the third man. “We—well…”

  “All right,” said the second man, “just come out and tell the man.”

  “Right, so. It’s like this,” said the redhead. “We heard of the passin’ of yer grandfa’ar. We’re all very sorry about it. And we heard too that ’twas to be an Irish wake, the Manns bein’ an old Irish clan. We’re right sorry to just show up like this, y’see, but…” he appeared to lose confidence here, and he looked to his companions for encouragement.

  “’Twouldn’t be an Irish wake without Irish music,” finished the second man. “So if ye’d like us to play fer ya, we can do it. And if not, why, we’re sorry to just jump in like this, and we’ll be on our way.”

  But he was speaking to empty space, for I had already begun clearing a spot for them against the wall. It was perfect, I thought. It was fate. How could I have forgotten to get Irish musicians for an Irish wake?

  “You guys sit here,” I said. “Play away. Play like maniacs. I don’t know who told you to come up here, but I’m glad as hell you showed up.”

  The men sat down and two of them took out their instruments. The second one, the one who carried the fiddle case, bounced up again quickly from his chair and took me by the arm.

  “If I might have a word with ye,” he said. “In private, like.”

  We stepped into the kitchen, where it was slightly less crowded. The house had become full of people.

  “I’ve been asked to deliver a message,” said the man. All traces of shyness were gone now. He still clutched my arm, but his hand was almost weightless. I had to look to see if it was there at all.

  “A message?” I said.

  “Aye.”

  “From whom?”

  “Someone who cares greatly about you,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  The man cleared his throat and looked upward for a moment as though trying to refresh his memory.

  “When God rejoices,” he said, as if quoting, “you rejoice.”

  A chill went down my spine.

  “What?” I said, though I’d heard him perfectly well.

  “When God rejoices, you rejoice,” said the man again.

  We stood staring at each other for several moments. He looked directly into my eyes, and again I felt a surge of recognition, as if I had known this man at some time, somehow, somewhere. But I couldn’t place his face. It didn’t seem to matter, however. A sense of calm filtered through me as I thought about what he’d just told me. I thought I knew what this message meant. It was the equivalent of a telegram from one who has successfully completed a long voyage. It was the same sort of message immigrants from Ireland might have sent back home, years ago, when their journey across the ocean was completed and they were in the New World: arrived safely, all is well, please don’t worry about me.

  It was a message from Grandpa.

  “Who the hell are you?” I asked.

  “I’m a musician,” said the man. “And an Irishman, like yourself.”

  “That doesn’t tell me anything.”

  “Shhh,” said the man. He patted me on the shoulder. “Listen to the music. Don’t think so much. That’s what music is for. It reminds you to dance once in a while.”

  Abruptly he went back into the living room. A moment later there was a heart-rending whine, and the piercing, poignant tones of a tune—a very old tune, from the sound of it—filled the living room. The redhead was playing his pipes. The houseful of mourners who’d come to see my grandfather off fell silent and listened. The sound was oddly familiar. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and another chill shot through me.

  Grandpa had told me that in his youth the Manns had hosted endless parties, parties that featured exactly this kind of music. Ceili music, he called it. There had been more musicians around then, he said, and there were three in particular who used to show up every once in a while. When they did, the entire town turned out to listen to them—and to dance and drink and eat at the Manns’ expense—because it was widely held that they were the best Irish musicians in America, and some said they played with an almost supernatural ability. They were itinerants, and it was not often folks in Mannville got a chance to hear them—only once or twice a year. Grandpa said he didn’t know what had happened to the musicians. They looked a little thinner—a little more wan and haggard—every year, and then the last year before the war, they’d simply failed to show up. Nobody had ever seen them again. Grandpa spoke of them wistfully, as if still hoping they might reappear one day, grinning their shy grins and asking politely if they might be allowed to play, explaining their long absence by saying that they had temporarily lost their way, but that none of it mattered now—they were here again, and the music they offered commanded one to listen, and to forget.

  The piper played a long time, I think. I remained standing where the little man had left me in the kitchen, my head against the wall. I knew what those pipes were now. They were called Uilleann pipes. Grandpa had tried to describe them to me before, but there is no way to describe with words the sound that the Uilleann pipes make, no way to explain the effect they have on a wounded heart. It was not just a tune the redheaded man was playing. It was as if he was telling something; a story, perhaps, or maybe just a bit of reassurance. The sound of the pipes is a plaintive lament, shrill, reedy, warm and bright with life and dark with deep despair at the same time; one listens not only with the ears but with the heart. I could feel it entering me, penetrating me right down to the hollow vibrating void that had been there since I had watched Grandpa close his eyes for the last time.

  “You have begun reading the diary?”

  The enquiry was made in a voice both small and powerful, and I turned to see Enzo. He seemed to have grown smaller in the company of so many burly Americans. His thick glasses gave him an owlish look.

  “Yes,” I said. “I hope you slept all right last night. Was the bed okay?”

  Enzo dismissed this question with a flick of his hand as not worth answering. I have survived far worse catastrophes than uncomfortable beds, it seemed to say; do not insult me by asking how I slept.

  “I wish to inform you of the arrival of the mail delivery,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The mail. You have received letters.”

  “Thanks,” I said. When he remained there staring at me, I said, “I’ll get them later. I want to listen to the music.”

  “You do not think it important?”

  “Not now,” I said. “Probably a few bills or something. Always at least a few bills.”

  “Perhaps you ought to make sure,” he said. Again his voice played that trick on my ears, barely audible yet impressing itself deeply on my mind. It must have been the same technique he used on the doctors at the hospital to find out Grandpa’s condition. And suddenly his meaning became clear. I’d told him the story of my quest to discover who my mother was, right down to the detail of the Air Force having sent my father’s personal effects to an address other than
his home. And I’d said I was waiting to hear what that address might be. I’d been waiting so long to find out, I’d forgotten I was waiting at all. Enzo had seen the mailman arrive, and something had told him to go out and check the mailbox himself and then to come and get me.

  “I’ll go check it right now,” I said.

  Enzo smiled.

  More cars pulled into the driveway as I walked out to the mailbox and opened it. The sounds of laughter were audible outside now, even where I was standing out by the mailbox, holding a thin blue envelope in my hand. Laughter. At Grandpa’s wake. He would be delighted. It would have suited him just perfectly to have everyone forget his death and enjoy themselves one more time in their lives than they would have otherwise.

  I held the envelope up to the sun. There was a single sheet of paper in it. Casually, feigning disinterest to myself, I opened the envelope and read the letter.

  “Dear Mr. Mann,” it read:

  Pursuant to your request of March 1988, enclosed please find the information for which you have been looking.

  Good luck.

  Following was a street address in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  It was once my mother’s address. And it might still be.

  There was also a name above the address. A full name. Her name.

  How easy it would be, I thought, to lose this piece of paper, which is almost lighter than air, and which would disappear if I tossed it up into the breeze. Or how easy to rip it up and toss it into a garbage can without anyone noticing, and my life would never have to change.

  Occasionally our entire destiny hinges on something as insignificant as one thin piece of paper. It’s at moments such as these that the machinations of fate are revealed to be as flimsy and pliable as a silk scarf. I could, I thought, stay here in Mannville forever and not know anything more than I already did. At least I wouldn’t know any less, and the future itself would be certain. Grandpa had left me money. I could keep the house, get a job, get married, have more Manns, and tell them the stories of the ghosts who had once wandered through the dusty hallways. Nothing needed to change that.

  But I knew that wasn’t going to be the way it was. The future had always been blank to me, but it was not the obscurity of hopelessness; it was the darkness of what is unknown simply because it hasn’t yet been explored. It was like looking down the corridor between the two mirrors in Grandpa’s bedroom. I had to go into it. I had to explore. Otherwise I would never know what was around the bend, and I would live a miserable life, and die a disgruntled death.