Beneficence, p.7
Beneficence, page 7
Tup cried hard in the night and came down to the kitchen for me. His cries collided with the terrible roar of my blood and I started up and pulled away from him. Doris, he said again and again. Doris, hold me. Please hold me.
Spring is late. It snowed in the night, a muddy blanket.
The third day. Tup and his brother pulled me away from the body of my son. It’s time, Tup said. It’s time, Doris.
They put the box in the back of the truck and put Dodie and Beston in the cab with Tup. These are my children now. Everyone followed on foot as Tup carried him to the hill. I stood at the shed door and watched the truck cut dark lines in the new snow, people I know walking behind in their boots and black hats, their tracks a wavering line of mud across the white fields and up onto the hill under the pines. The mound of dirt, a mark against the thin snow. Our minister, Franklin Clough, wore his silk stole over his coat, the red angry against the morning. Who dug the hole? Tup and someone lifted the box out of the truck. My two children were very far away, small in the great expanse of white.
Franklin Clough kissed the end of his stole and let God put my son in the hole today. The son. The holy ghost.
Wind came and knocked the snow from the pines onto the stooped back of my husband as he bent to his shovel. I could see the wind, but I could not hear it.
Tup’s brother, Albert, said to Beston, You’re the big man now, son. You need to fill Sonny’s shoes and help your parents run this place. No more games.
Tup lunged at him from the table. His chair tipped over. That’s horseshit! he screamed at Albert. That’s horseshit! He’s just a little boy! He isn’t Sonny! Don’t you ever say that to my son again! And in the light we could see the spit at his mouth fly at his brother.
Beston leaned against my chair, watching the men. And then he cried, his face turned to my lap.
The children returned to school this morning. I forgot to make them a lunch for their boxes, and Dodie packed bread and butter and apples from the cellar. They turned to me at the door and waved. The school bus door hissed as it always has. Tup never came to the kitchen for breakfast, and I threw his food to the pigs. It was an accident, Doris. There was nothing you did wrong, he begged me.
I reached under my nightgown and felt the softness of my belly. I made three children.
Sonny lived here in me.
Beston cried in the night and Tup moved to his room, the first time in separate beds since our wedding night. In the cold silence came the winter owl.
Tup and May tried again to take me to the hospital. I float above myself, watching.
Tup came to our bed last night. We do not sleep.
We have routines here. Everything must still be done. Tup feeds and milks. I run the separator, then make breakfast while Tup loads the milk on the co-op truck. The children go off to school. Dishes. Laundry. Lunch for Tup. The tractor drones back and forth, back and forth in the fields, spreading the winter’s manure. The cows mill around in the paddock, their legs crusted in mud while they wait for the pastures to dry. I stand at the window. I rebuild the fire I let go out in the kitchen.
“Do you want May to help getting the garden in?” Tup asked me.
But I shook my head no. I planted the seeds for the tender crops in the flats and laid them in the sun in the shed. Dodie wanted to help, but I got it done while she was at school. The children will be home for the summer soon. I am not ready.
I stooped, making my rows for the early crops, peas and cabbage and spinach and carrots and beets. The soil was cold, my hands were cold. The spring sun weak on my back. This is the same soil.
Sweep. Sterilize the milk buckets. Scrub out the sink.
Dodie holds Beston’s hand. I know these children are lost. I cannot find my way to them. I am wrong, I know this. I have always known my obligation to give my love. There is nothing here now. I feel a great wrenching when I see Dodie trying to comfort her brother. I mean to stand, to move to them, to draw them finally to my lap, to say words that will soften this for them. I mean to do this. I know we all hear that one terrible detonation, the explosion that took all of us. I watch them from this new land that is so far from the silenced house.
Once, Sonny asked if they could dig up the cat we had buried that spring to see what had happened to the body. I said yes.
Once, Sonny ran through the kitchen shrieking, with Dodie chasing him. Get me! Get me! he laughed.
Once, when we were all in the truck, Sonny had been quiet, not a word, and then suddenly he started to sing, a little song he learned at school. We all laughed, and he sang it through again and again.
“Go outside now,” I said to Dodie.
She stood still, waiting.
“I don’t need your help today,” I said. She went down the hall and I heard her climb the stairs. Beston followed her. Later, I watched them walk along the fences toward Tup in the west pasture.
I cook what we need for supper. There are five chairs at our table. I reach for five plates.
Sonny likes mustard on his meat loaf. Our kitchen is suddenly vacant and noisy with the scratching sounds of eating. I forgot to make coffee for Tup, but he said he didn’t want any tonight.
What will we do with his chair? With the empty side of this table?
Tup told me this morning after the children left for school that he was drawing a bath for me.
“No. Do your work,” I said.
“It will wait,” he said.
He led me to the tub in the shed and put a towel on the clean floor. The boards are worn and scrubbed smooth as skin. Tup sat me on the side of the tub and pulled off my shoes and then my socks. I let him do this. He drew me up and unbuttoned my dress. His fingers were slow and clumsy. He lifted it over my head and put it in the basket to be washed. Then my slip, and my underwear. I could smell myself as I stepped out of my clothes. Tup did not talk to me. I was grateful. He held my hand as I stepped into the warm water. I lay back, the square of sun at the window coming behind my closed eyes. Tup sat in the chair. I could feel him, as if he were guarding me. He let me be. Later, before the water cooled, he knelt by the tub and slipped me down and poured water over my hair, his hand strong behind my neck. Tup’s hands. Our old lives. I cried, the tears sliding down my neck to the water. He washed my hair and rinsed it and drew me up into a clean towel. The air was warm, spring coming.
Tup walked behind me up the stairs to our bedroom. He helped me dress, as if I were a child, buttoning a clean dress and brushing my wet hair.
“Doris,” he said.
He led me to our bed, and we lay side by side with the window open.
The seeds are coming up. All of this is so familiar, and so far away.
Tup cried last night, standing at the window in our room. His body heaved, a struggle to be freed.
The front room is closed. Its walls press out at us, a terrible pressure.
Sunday. Tup and the children walked to the hill. No one told me and then they were moving across the field, Beston and Dodie holding Tup’s hands. His fields are greening. He looked so small, tired and shuffling. It hurt me. My broken husband. A helpless man. Their shadows stretched thin and uncertain. They sat under the great pines, shimmering silver in the sun.
“We need to get a stone,” Tup has said to me.
“No,” I said. “No.”
I can see that he has made a cross from wood, and laid a white rock on the raw soil. What would a marker say? Let the grass cover my son.
May came and opened all the windows and swept and washed the floors. She cleared the sink counter and caught up on laundry. She is kindly, like Tup, but I did not ask her to come here.
Later, May said she would take the children to Vernon to the stores there. It felt very sad to me, but they arrived home pleased with their store-bought clothes, and relieved, I believe, to have had a break from home.
“Doris,” May said, “I think it’s time we go into Sonny’s room. It has been three months. We could wash his bed linens.”
I shouted at her, “No!”
She tried to move toward me to hold me in an embrace.
“Don’t,” I said.
Tup and May cornered me and told me there is a rest home in Grafton. No. I am doing what needs to be done here.
Tup and Beston cut the June hay this week. Beston wanted to help, and Tup said yes. My husband has been good to the children. I will come back to myself. The sickle bar jangled as it scissored back and forth, back and forth. Tup told me to include Dodie in my work in the garden today, and so she moved row to row beside me. She works too eagerly, as if she is afraid of me now. It started to rain so we came in with the baskets of pea pods. We sat together on the porch and shelled them, the crackle of the breaking pods all that bound us.
Dodie is twelve now. It is as if Sonny left and Dodie had to leap into his place. She does not resemble the child of last summer in any way, I see that. Her face is thin and strained. Her legs are long, and her feet have grown large. Her shoulders have widened, as if she prepared herself for all this. I see the woman in her now, a shadow coming.
“Mum,” she said.
I could not answer.
“Mum,” she said again. “Just answer one question.”
I said, “I can’t answer any of your questions, Dodie.” I did not intend to sound harsh.
“But Mum.”
We were quiet for a minute.
“Why did we want to play with the old gun?”
The peas rolled smooth and hard when I moved my fingers through the bowl, picking out bits of pod.
“Do you think he is in heaven?” Dodie asked. “Do you think he can hear us? Mum. We always played with that gun. Was it me? Mum, was it me?” and Dodie cried. “Did I do this?”
I stood and carried the peas to the kitchen. The blanching water was boiling and I poured the peas into the steaming pot. Dodie stood beside me, crying again and again, Mum. Mum.
Tup stood before me naked, stroking my hair. He is thin, emptied. What is here now will always be.
“Talk to me,” he said. “Doris.”
I turned away from his breath.
“You hate me for letting Sonny have that gun. But children have played with that gun in this house since before I was born,” Tup cried. “Doris.”
I know that my children and my husband are calling to me for help. I hear their voices, faint and indistinct, crying out to me from a distant shore. I want to respond. The wind and churning current carry me beyond them. When I turn to answer, all any of us hear is the roar of the storm.
Dodie asked if Marion could come.
“There is no need for children to be coming here,” I said.
Hovey and Daniel came here one day. If I had said no. The afternoon would have swerved into a different story if I had said what I knew was right.
Dodie asked if she could go to town to visit with Marion.
“You stay here,” I said.
Tup argued for her, but then he said, “It’s okay, Dodie. You stay here and play with Best.”
Once, Sonny sat on the well cover and braided long strands of sedge grass he had brought from the creek. He let Dodie and Beston watch him. It was a cloudy day, and windy, and the long grass blew gently across his thin legs, side to side. Sonny was a skinny boy. His pants hung loose from his bunched belt. His sharp little shoulder blades.
Daniel and Hovey. Who took them home? Their childhoods gone, too, I know that.
Sonny had golden down on his arms, even when he was fourteen. We teased him. Baby duck, we said, and he was embarrassed and pulled his sleeves down. His skin was a child’s skin, smooth and thin. He had a scar in his left eyebrow from falling off his bike. A scar under his chin from falling against the grain bins. A round, pecked scar on his right arm from his smallpox vaccination. A line across his right knee. On his collarbone. From what? I try to remember.
In the night, I woke Tup and asked, “Do you remember this?”
And I sang the lullaby Sonny heard as he nursed to sleep, and later Tup sang it to him in the dark as he went to sleep in his own little bed. My voice was uncertain, so unpracticed. A candle, a candle, to light me to bed . . .
Tup was still.
The moon is as sleepy as sleepy can be . . .
Tup said, “Don’t. Don’t do this, Doris. You can’t do this.”
I sang the whole song, it rising from far away, the aching sweet and unbearable.
“I want to go in Sonny’s room,” Dodie said this morning.
“There is no need for that,” I said.
Tup watched us. Beston moved to his father’s side and waited.
My voice, I can hear, is hard now. I don’t intend to be harsh with my children. Where have I gone?
Once Tup drove us all to the pond on our stream in Chase Mills. The children stripped off their clothes and jumped from the ledge, raising big spouts of water. Sonny was still a boy. This might have been the last summer he agreed to swim naked. After each jump, the children’s heads popped above the surface, Sonny, Dodie, Beston. Their happy voices echoed against the old mill dam. Watch this! they cried. Mum! Daddy! Watch this! The water there is colored like tea from the tannin in all the fallen leaves. I could see their little legs churning to stay afloat, ghostly white limbs in the golden water.
Dodie
Mum asked me to take Beston outside to play. She stood at the window looking out, and I waved to her, but she wasn’t watching us. Daddy let us help him in the workshop stacking the new fence posts he was cutting. Best went into the paddock and lay in the sun against one of the sleeping cows.
I dreamed last night that cars kept coming into the yard and too many people got out and came inside. I ran from room to room looking for Mum but I couldn’t find her. All the doors were closed. It was sleeting outside.
Best and I went back to school today. We asked Mum and Daddy if we could stay home for another week, but they both said no. We don’t want to talk to anyone, but no one wants to talk to us anymore, either. They made a wide circle around us. Daddy said that we need to remember that this town is a good town, that these are our friends, that they are just scared. I don’t know what they could be scared of. They weren’t there. Hovey and Daniel weren’t in school. Mum and Daddy are asking too much of Best to go back so soon.
“Dodie, let us take care of Beston,” Daddy said. “You have plenty to take care of yourself.”
After school, we took our bikes down the road to the old stone bridge over the creek and sat with our legs hanging over. Beston held my hand the whole time. Daddy says we will forget some of this, that forgetting is a blessing hidden inside bad things. I don’t know if Beston will ever forget. He was right beside Sonny, and something awful happened to him there. I can’t tell the difference between forgetting and remembering. I think I was facing Sonny. Everyone was laughing and talking out loud. Beston wanted a turn. My turn, he called. But I wanted a turn, too. Did I reach across? I can see someone reaching across and I think it’s me. A movie that jerks and rattles inside me.
When it started getting cold we went home and Daddy said, “Just the people I was hoping would come by. Will you help me feed the cows?”
It feels so much better when Daddy is with us. He tells us what to do. When we sit down on the porch after supper, he holds my hand. And Beston’s hand. Mum doesn’t like us to sit near her. She stays in the kitchen and stares. Daddy says that she is sick and will get better when she’s had some time.
One thing I always loved in this house was lying in bed and knowing that each of us was there, in our place, while the dark came into our rooms and bound us together for the night. Sonny in his room, Beston in his, Mum and Daddy in theirs, me in mine. No one had to stand guard. Now we all do. Some nights I go to Mum and Daddy’s door and look in. Mum lies straight in bed next to Daddy. He isn’t touching her hair, she isn’t lying across his legs. Some nights Daddy is already in Beston’s room and Mum lies on her side facing the wall, her back to me. I wait, hoping she will sense me there and lift the covers and call me to her.
I watered the seedlings in the shed to help Mum, and when I told her she just nodded. This time she let me hang out the laundry with her. I shook each thing out and handed it to her.
When we were done, she said, “Thank you, Dodie.” Then she stood looking at me. She wears the same clothes each day. “Thank you,” she said. “Now you go play.”
On Saturday I sprinkled and ironed the clothes. I set up the board myself, and gathered all the clothes from the basket in the kitchen, still left from before. In the bottom I found two of Sonny’s shirts and a pair of pants. I could feel the sharpness in my chest, and it wouldn’t go away. I found Mum sterilizing the milk separator and held them out to her. She looked from me to my hands and to me, and then she reached slowly across and pulled them from me and turned away. I wanted to ask for them back, to bring them inside and sprinkle them and put them in the cold bin in the refrigerator and later open the damp pile and I would spread each sleeve tight and straight and the iron would hiss across the plaid cloth saying yes, yes, yes and I would turn the sleeve over and then the cuffs and the collar and the button placket and the left side, then the right side, the sun out on a nice morning and the iron heavy and balanced and sliding across the cloth the way it always does. I would walk up the stairs with each pile, Best’s and mine and Mum’s and Daddy’s and then Sonny’s, into his open room and I would lay his things in his drawers with all his other clothes that I know by heart and I would go back downstairs and put the hot iron on the sink to cool and take down the creaking ironing board and hang it back in the cellar stairway and Sonny and Beston and I would have the rest of the day to play. We would ride down to the creek and see if the pickerel weed was blooming and we would lie in the cool damp grass and talk. Our creek would make its own talk as it made its way to us and past us and on, like a hymn.
