Faraway Places (Hawthorne Rediscovery) by Tom Spanbauer
The only way that you can begin is at the beginning. And so I finally began: “I have been swimming in the Portneuf pretty near all summer now,” I said, and looked at her. My mother looked back at me.
And then my father walked in the door with the newspaper in his hand and said this, all at once, “That woman, that Injun woman cross the river, the one they call Sugar Babe, who lives with that nigger over there, well, they found her naked and floating in the river, dead. Been there a couple of days, it says here. Says there wasn’t much left of her, that some dogs or coyotes probably got to her in the river. And it says the nigger she lives with over there in that lean-to is missing. They got a posse out right now looking for that nigger. Says here they think the nigger probably killed her.” And then he said what he always said. “Always trouble with those kind of people. They just got a nose for it.”
My father then looked at my mother and my mother looked at my father and then my mother looked back at me, her eye way off somewhere else, and then she crossed herself. I looked at my father and then we all looked at each other.
“Your son’s been swimming in the Portneuf,” my mother said to my father. “And one thing always leads to another.” Then she said, “Forevermore,” and she crossed herself again.
“Harold P. Endicott killed her, killed that woman Sugar Babe,” I said.
“What were you doing in that river?” my father said. He dropped the paper on the floor.
“Endicott hit her and she fell down and then the nigger jumped on top of Endicott and then Endicott whistled for his dogs, and his dogs attacked that woman and the nigger,” I said.
“Didn’t I tell you to stay out of that river?” my father said.
“The nigger didn’t kill her, Endicott killed her, his hellhounds killed her.”
“What were you doing in the Portneuf ?” my father said. “I told you not to go in the river.”
“The nigger didn’t kill her, I know it. It was Endicott who did it. She was his mother.”
“Who was his mother?” my mother said.
“That woman, Sugar Babe,” I said.
“Whose mother?” my mother said.
“The nigger’s! He wouldn’t kill his mother.” My mother’s left eye started to drift.
“How do you know she was his mother?” my father asked.
“That’s what the nigger called her when the dogs was on them.” I said.
“Forevermore!” my mother said, and crossed herself.
“None of this would have happened if you’d stayed out of the river,” my father said.
“Nigger’s probably dead too,” I said, and then there was a silence and my father looked at the floor, at the headlines on the newspaper lying there. My mother was looking too. Those words seemed like they were bigger than even my father in the room right then; bigger than all of us: WOMAN DEAD. It was quiet for a while longer and then my father told my mother to leave us alone.
“What you going to do?” my mother asked my father. My father looked at her strange and he leaned back a little, like I’d seen him lean back when his own mother, Grandma Ruth, talked to him, and he got a hurt look on his face that my mother could ask such a question. My mother was standing up and we were both sitting down, my father and I, looking at my mother.
“This boy’s too old to give a licking to, but I’m going to,” my father said.
“The boy didn’t do nothing,” my mother said.
“He jumped in the river!” my father said, and stood up fast, kicking the chair back, “and I told him to stay clear of that river and those people. Now, just look at this mess!” my father said, moving his face right up against hers.
They stood there like that, the two of them, my mother and my father, squared off, my father’s hands becoming fists.
“You’re going to lose that boy,” my mother said. “You can’t beat that boy for this.”
“Mary,” my father said. I had never heard my father call my mother that. “Leave us alone now. This is not a woman’s concern.”
The way my father said “Mary” like that and “woman” like that, did it. My mother turned and walked over to where she kept the silverware and got the paring knife out of the drawer. Then she walked outside through the kitchen door, and the way she looked walking out, the way the kitchen door opened, reminded me again of the night of the chinook.
My father took his belt off and told me to drop my pants; told me to bend over and hold on to the edge of the supper table and drop my pants, just like he had told me to do other times.
I wanted to say something big then. I wanted to use those words he used when my mother wasn’t around—use them to say something big.
But I held my breath, like I had all those other times in the past, and dropped my pants and my shorts, my back to him, and leaned over and grabbed on to the edge of the supper table.
Other times, my father would have hit me three or four times right off and I would have had my pants back up in nothing flat and neither of us would have said anything for a bit. Then he’d say something like don’t ever do that again, or shape up or ship out, but that was when I was younger.
This time, as I stood there like that, waiting, nothing happened. I turned to see what was up, and saw in my father’s face something I had never seen there before. I don’t know what it was, but his face was red and he was blinking, and when he saw me turn, he hit me twice—harder than other times, harder than ever before—and I felt awful enough to puke.
“I’m ashamed of you,” my father said. “Pull your pants up!” he said.
I didn’t want to move because it hurt, but I did what he told me to do. I turned around, faced him, and pulled up my shorts, and then my pants. His face got redder and he was still blinking and he did something else then too. Something new. His upper lip quivered a little, though you could tell he was trying to act like his lip wasn’t doing that.
It was then that I realized my awful feeling was a feeling for him, not for me, and that I’m ashamed of you, is what I should have been saying then to him. So I looked him straight in the eye, and I did say it: I’m ashamed of you, not out loud, but in my head, and even though I didn’t say it right out, I got my point across.
“Let me educate you about this mother stuff,” my father said. “Even though you should know things like this already by now,” he said. “Those people, them niggers, got a way of talking. They use that word ‘mother’ different from how we use it. When they say ‘mother’ what they’re really saying is ‘mother fucker.’ That’s just their way.”
My father’s face wasn’t red anymore. He wasn’t blinking and his lip was back to normal. “Now, I don’t have to tell you what ‘motherfucker’ means, do I?” my father said.
We were still eye to eye, my father and me. “No,” I said, “you don’t have to tell me. I know what it means.”
My father told me to go to my room and not to come back out until he told me to. I walked out of the kitchen into the hall of butterflies and dice and went upstairs. I closed the door to my room hard, but I didn’t slam it. A temper wasn’t allowed in the house, or anywhere near my parents. I went straight for my window and opened it up all the way. I was going to slide down the eave to the trellis with the Seven Sisters rose hanging on it, and climb down and get right out of there, get away from him, get away from my father. I was thinking about going to California or Broadway—any place faraway—but deep down I knew I’d probably settle for my swing up in the cottonwoods.
Just then the sheriff drove his Jeep into the yard, and not long after the sheriff drove in, the Matisse County Mounted Posse rode in on their horses—no shiny shirts this time, no American flag, and no Harold P. Endicott. The sheriff shut off his Jeep and the men on horses gathered around.
My mother got up quick-like from the lawn where she had been digging dandelions up by their roots, and walked into the house. I heard the screen door slam, then the murmur of my mother and father talking downstairs. The screen door slammed again,
“’Evening, Joe!” the sheriff said loud and friendly so everyone could hear. “How’s everything?”
“Can’t complain, Bill,” my father said. “That is, if the wind don’t blow us away!”
“Yup, she’s as dry as a bone,” the sheriff said.
“Don’t look good,” my father said.
A couple of men in the posse said hello to my father and my father said hello back. Hello, Clyde. Hello, Sam. Hello, Jeff. Hello, Jay. Hello, Eric. Hello, J.D.
“What you guys up to? Looking for trouble?” my father said.
“Yeah, trouble,” the sheriff said. “We’re looking for the nigger. You seen this evening’s paper?”
“Yeah, I saw it,” my father said. “Was just reading about it. Those people got a nose for trouble.”
“Hell, Joe, you know that ain’t the part of them that gets them into trouble!” the sheriff said, and all the men laughed and my father laughed too.
“You seen him around here?” the sheriff asked.
“Nope,” my father said.
“How about the rest of your family, your wife, Mary, she seen him?” the sheriff asked.
“Nope,” my father said.
“How about that strapping son of yours, he seen him?” the sheriff asked.
“Nope,” my father said. “He ain’t seen him neither.”
AUGUST THAT YEAR was like the toolshed at noon. There was no wind, just the sun hot overhead, too bright, drying out everything, burning up shadows. Even at night, it was never really dark; things still had that sun in them and they glowed like stars, like those kinds of rosaries and statues of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that glow in the dark. Once in a while there was thunder and lightning, but never rain. The dogs would howl and those hawks just kept flying, even in the dark.
I was like that too, like those hot nights in August: burning up, thunder and lightning from down there shooting up to my brain, me in my bed sweating away and staining things yellow. My mother just couldn’t wash that yellow out, and I knew that she tried. She’d soak my shorts in the kitchen sink in Clorox and bluing for the whole day.
I wanted to stop—stop yellowing things up—because it was a mess and a sin and I had to count the times and tell Monsignor Canby about every occasion, tick off those sins like the red triangle flags snapping, marking the miles, in the wind. Mortal, every one of them, mortal, every time. But I just couldn’t stop the yellowing or the counting neither, couldn’t stop counting the red flags. I couldn’t let up, just like the sun couldn’t that August.
THAT YEAR THE Blackfoot State Fair was in August, the last week. We always went to the Blackfoot State Fair: my mother, my father, and me. Usually we would get up early and drive to Blackfoot and go to the fair and spend the whole day there and then see the fireworks in the grandstand that night and stay overnight at my Grandma Hannah’s—my mother’s mother—then go back home the next morning.
I always used to look forward to the Blackfoot State Fair, used to count the days to go on the calendar, crossing them off. But that year, that year of the chinook, that dry, hot, river-jumping, staining-things- yellow year of those three forbidden people, the year my father lied to the sheriff, was different. I didn’t even want to go to the Blackfoot State Fair that year. I wanted them—my mother and my father—to go to the Blackfoot State Fair without me. But my father wouldn’t hear of it. I went and did those things like I did every year that I used to like to do and hated now: I put on my black polished Sunday shoes and red socks and my new stiff Levi’s—washed only once—and the new shirt my mother bought me at J.C. Penney’s: short-sleeved and blue that looked like it was two shirts—a blue plaid shirt under a solid blue vest—but it wasn’t. It was all one shirt, and I rolled up the sleeves. I put my toothbrush in with the rest of the bathroom stuff that my mother put in a plastic bag, and a change of underwear, and I got in the back seat of the Oldsmobile. My father drove—he always drove—and we bought Cokes and RC Colas at the Wyz-Way market like we always did and I got a Snickers, and my mother wanted me to sing those same old songs with her: “Faith, Hope, and Charity” and “Going to the Chapel and We’re Going to Get Married.” I sang along, all right, but I didn’t like it. I wanted to listen to the radio, to the rock-and-roll station.
For the first time that year, as I sang away in the back seat, I wondered why the old man, why my father, never sang with us. Other years, when my mother and I sang those old dumb songs, we were singing for him. We were entertaining him. Seems like everything my mother and I did was for him, and that year, that August, things were different. I was older and figured out what was going on and didn’t like it.
Why couldn’t he come up with a song once? Now, that would be entertaining.
When we got to Blackfoot, there was a lot of traffic and it took a long time to get to the main gate. Then once we got to the main gate, we had to park the Oldsmobile way out there in the sun. It took us a long time to get to the barns, and when we did, we were all covered with dust, and there wasn’t any decent place for my mother to freshen up.
But none of those things were really that much bother—at least they didn’t bother me. What did bother me at the Blackfoot State Fair was the same thing that bothered me every year. My mother and my father always seemed to pick the Blackfoot State Fair to be mad at each other—be mad and stay mad. Until that year, my mother and father only got mad at each other at the Blackfoot State Fair.
When they were mad at each other, my mother and my father didn’t act or talk any way different from the usual, although my father’s voice got higher and my mother’s got lower and my mother smoked my father’s Viceroys in front of him. They still talked to each other, but they didn’t say much. My mother said her usual things—you want another ice cube, Dad, stuff like that—and my father gave his usual answers: Yeah, Mom, I’ll have one, or nope, and just drive and smoke Viceroys.
What got different when my mother and my father were mad at each other was the world; everything and everybody else was a little off—a touch cantankerous, and full of bother. My mother called it the devil’s work, and crossed herself when she said devil, but crossing herself didn’t stop the mischief. Everybody drove like they were from Utah, the Cokes weren’t cold enough, and somebody always got to the perfect parking space before us, or just as we pulled up, the traffic cop put his hand out so we had to stop and let everybody else and their dog go ahead.
My mother’s eye got cockeyed when she was mad at my father at the Blackfoot State Fair, but not like that way it had the night of the chinook. Both eyes went slightly off, slightly askew—her right eye, not just the left eye.
My mother kept saying forevermore, and my father made that clucking sound with his tongue, said those words under his breath, and turned his knuckles white gripping the steering wheel.
Other years, when we went to the Blackfoot State Fair, I used to try to do things to keep them from being mad at each other, tried to keep the conversation going, making comments about things I noticed: how straight the barbed wire next to the road was, what a neat car just passed us, how nice my mother’s singing voice was, though it wasn’t all that great.
But that year I didn’t bother with any of that kind of stuff. I just let it go the way it always got anyway.
My mother said it was a crying shame the way the crops looked on display on the counters in the vegetable barns that year. A crying shame, she said, forevermore. The sugar beets and the potatoes were half the size of the year before, and the garden vegetables—the carrots and string beans and acorn squash—were a disgrace. The sheaves of wheat should be as tall as you are, my father said, meaning as tall as me. But that year they were knee-high, maybe even shorter.
In the cow barns, things were a little better. The cattle and the pigs and the sheep all seemed fat and sassy like other years, and their troughs were full of water, but all everybody could talk about was the drought and how hard it was to get feed, and
When we got through with looking at the crops and the animals, usually we would go to the canned-goods part, then the arts-and-crafts section, where there was quilting and embroidery and fruit drying out; then we would go to where the machinery was and wait while my father talked combines and beet toppers and grain drills with the John Deere man. That’s usually how it went. We usually did the machinery right after the crops and animals and canned goods and arts and crafts, and that year was no different. My father’s eyes lit up soon as he saw those shiny new green John Deere machines. He headed straight for them, and everything seemed the way it had always been at the Blackfoot State Fair. But then my mother gave me two dollars and told me not to tell my father she’d given me the money. Then she told me to take off out of there and have a good time before it was too late to have any more good times. I looked at those two dollar bills in my hand and asked her what time I should be back by. It’s a small world, my mother said, and you’re not getting away from me that easy. There’s plenty of time to worry about time, she said. I hugged my mother, fast, and was all of a sudden very sad for her, things starting to seem suddenly different than usual at the Blackfoot State Fair. I hugged her fast, right there by the new three-bottom John Deere plow, and took off.
I GOT MY hand stamped when I left the fairgrounds so I could get back in, and I walked down Main Street Blackfoot, past the courthouse and past Klegg’s Used Furniture Store where my mother and my father had bought my bed. I walked right into the Oasis Bar and bought a bottle of Schlitz and a pack of Lucky Strikes. I didn’t want to buy Viceroys; they had filters. The bartender was an old woman, half-blind, and I think she was drunk. She gave me back too much change, but rather than say anything, I just left the difference—fifteen cents—on the counter there.