Jennies boy, p.5
Jennie's Boy, page 5
“I don’t think Ned is afraid of him.”
“Maybe not. But he should be.”
“Maybe Murchie just wants a taste of tea.”
“What he wants a taste of is Ned’s upper lip.”
“He never slinked out like that when I was here before we moved to town. Maybe he missed me.”
“You were missed, but not by Murcheson.”
I asked her if cats went to heaven. “I never heard of a cat going to heaven. Or hell or anywhere else. In the Bible, pets are not exactly front and centre. Maybe some animals were pets before they were sacrificed. Jesus didn’t have pets. Jesus was all business. There’s nothing in the Bible about Him wandering around with a dog named Rover and teaching him to fetch a stick. That’s a sin for me.” She crossed herself.
“I don’t know about cats. I haven’t got it all figured out. There were plagues of frogs that caused warts. I wouldn’t want a pet frog that could give me warts. It’s not like frogs have a lot going for them in the first place. Add warts into the mix and you’d have a hard time taking a shine to one. There were plagues of locusts back then, too. You’d have to be awful stuck for a pet to try to make one out of a locust. You wouldn’t get a lot of affection back from one. You’d have to keep it in a little box, I suppose. How would you tell it apart from all the others if it got loose? It wouldn’t come when you called it. How would it know its name? And what would you call a pet locust?” She fell silent, pondering, then said, “Animals might have their own heaven, I suppose, some place where they’d be safe from us and safe from each other. Everyone getting along. I don’t know where animals go when they die. Going nowhere is not much of a reward for being slaughtered, roasted and eaten, is it?”
four
About a week later, at the end of the day, Lucy and I knelt on the chesterfield in her front room and watched the road, waiting for the yellow bus that would drop my parents off at six o’clock. My heart sank when I saw Jennie step down from the bus alone.
Lucy said it was a shameful thing that everyone on the bus had seen that Jennie had come home from work by herself, all the way from St. John’s to the Goulds. Now she had to walk up the driveway to the front door, as conspicuously alone as she had been on the bus, a pregnant woman on a bus by herself, disgracefully unaccompanied by her husband, who, as everyone on the bus well knew, was sitting in some bar somewhere in town, drinking beer among strangers, paying three times what it would have cost at a corner store.
“She’ll rip into him for that when he comes home, whenever that will be,” Lucy said. “There won’t be a cent of the rent left.” And then the word would go round about that, too.
* * *
That evening, as we did on all such evenings when Dad didn’t come home, the five of us ate supper in silence. My brothers and I stayed at the table in solidarity with Jennie while she did the dishes and afterward stared blankly at the ashtray in front of her. We didn’t budge until she told us to go watch TV.
We were all in the boys’ room, me in my bed between the two bunks, none of us asleep, when Dad came home. We heard him stumble up the front steps, the door opening, him declaiming he was sorry, that he had only intended to have one or two drinks until he happened upon a friend whom he hadn’t seen in ages. Then we heard Jennie whispering urgently that he had to go to bed.
Being told to go to bed didn’t mean that Dad was getting off scot-free, only that his comeuppance was being deferred till he was sober, till they were next alone in the house or somewhere else or maybe right in front of us, depending on her mood and how much of the rent he had spent.
I hated it when she ripped into him. I hated those words, ripped into him. They might rip into each other. There was no telling what people would do or say when they were ripping in. Everything would go out of control, as it did when I coughed so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. After they were done, it would seem impossible that they would ever speak again, and the prospect of that, the idea that everything would be forever spoiled, would set me to coughing, which would make them rip into each other even harder.
Jennie waited until after they got off the bus the next day and he was following her down the driveway to the house. I was standing with Lucy in the open front door of her house, where Jennie had stationed us as further chastisement to Dad.
“You might as well steal the food right off your youngsters’ plates,” we heard Jennie say. “You might as well tear the clothes right off their backs. They’ll wind up begging in the streets because of you. We all will. Not you, maybe, but the five of us. You’d probably spend whatever we could scrounge up—I wouldn’t put it past you.”
“Go home,” Lucy said then. “Tell Craig to come get your bed.”
* * *
Jennie was still at it an hour later, after ordering all of us boys to stay put in the bunk room. I began to cough and to feel as if I would be sick. Craig rubbed my back in circles while Ken lay on his bunk, staring at the ceiling, his hands behind his head. In the bunk above the one that was always empty, Brian pressed his face into his pillow, his hands clasped around it as if he was trying to smother himself.
There was a racket in my head like there was when I had a fever. I felt as if someone was rattling a can full of marbles right beside my ear. A voice that seemed like it couldn’t be Jennie’s said words that ripped into me, and I felt the guilt that Dad was feeling and the sense of being cornered, with no choice but to cover up and take it.
I began to sweat so much my shirt got wet and then my hair. The room seemed to shake like a hundred people were jumping up and down in the kitchen.
I heard Dad say again that he’d just been having a good time with an old friend, and Jennie said he was a liar who, if he thought there was any money in it, would sell off his youngsters one by one. “You’ll put us in the poor house.”
Poor house. Poor little house. Poor thing. The house that was so mistreated, so misfortunate, so neglected and universally pitied that it was known as the poor house. I felt sorry for the walls, the beds, the ceiling. I wished there was something I could do for the poor house, which had done nothing to deserve being ripped into.
Dad told Jennie he agreed with her. If ever a woman was right about deserving better, about her youngsters deserving better, it was her. If truth be told, he was worse than even she could do justice to in words, because there were no words for what he was and she shouldn’t waste her breath telling him that he was wrong. He was no good, never had been, never would be, not as a husband or a father or a breadwinner. As for the boys, she would do a better job raising them alone than she would with his help and he would not have her debase herself by speaking out in his defence, because where Art Johnston was concerned, you couldn’t go too far, not even if you hired Shakespeare to denounce him on your behalf…
Dad kept going like this until the only way for her to disagree with him was to tell him that he was a better man than either of them gave him credit for.
She said he drank because no one could live up to the expectations he had for himself. He’d set the bar so high he had no hope of reaching it. If the worst thing you could say about a man was that he drank because he tried too hard, because he cared too much and was racked with guilt because he could not tolerate his limitations—if that was the worst you could say about Art Johnston, then let whoever wanted to say it say it, but she’d be damned if she would stoop so low.
The only good thing about her ripping into him was that it always ended with him humbly and silently accepting this view of himself as a man who could not possibly attain the heights of virtue upon which his eyes were forever fixed.
The ripping in was over. We went out to the kitchen. And, as often happened after Jennie finished with him, Dad began telling stories about his childhood in Ferryland.
Once, he said, when his family gathered to say the rosary in the kitchen, each of them kneeling and resting their forearms on a chair, his father did not put out his cigarette but simply set his ashtray on the seat and kept smoking, even when it was his turn to say the first halves of the Our Father and the Hail Mary.
“Art!” Jennie said, fighting back a grin. “That’s a lie and you know it.”
Dad said it wasn’t a lie. He said that, from that day on, his father had smoked during the rosary, and the children, if they wanted to, had eaten apples. I thought about children saying the rosary with their mouths full of loudly crunching apples while their father puffed his way through it, pausing now and then to light one up. We all laughed, even Jennie, though she put her hand over her mouth.
As they could not afford hair cream, Dad went on, he and his father and brothers resorted to running their hands through sheep’s wool until they had enough oil to keep their hair in place. Every male in the family, like every other male in every other family in Ferryland, took Confession and Communion and went on dates reeking of sheep, who, he said, if we took the trouble to look it up, were a source of the lanolin that was an ingredient of most hair cream.
We knew that the part about the lanolin was true, having looked it up before, but the more we protested the implausibility of the rest of the story, the more he feigned indignation at being ganged up on.
He told us of a pet crow his family had had whose tongue was split like a parrot’s and who repeated things, especially inappropriate things, that the family said, such as when the priest came to visit and the crow would not stop repeating, “Father Noble is an arsehole. Father Noble is an arsehole.”
He said that there was a fellow nicknamed Smokey, known not to be right in the head, who lived all his life with his parents. About once a year, he gave in to his compulsion to smoke a neighbour out of their house, stealthily climbing up onto their roof just after dark and stuffing their chimney with blankets, then remaining up there until the occupants and the smoke began to pour out through the doors and windows. At which point Smokey, in some strange declaration of triumph or satisfaction, would remove all his clothes before attempting a getaway. Smokey was always foiled and returned unharmed to his parents until, eventually, he was taken to an institution in St. John’s, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Dad was never closer to being happy than when he provoked us into saying that not a word he uttered about Ferryland was true. We provoked him as much as he provoked us until everyone but him was laughing.
Earnest, straight-faced, pretending that we were offending both him and Ferryland with our disbelief, he went on riffing about his childhood until I saw by his eyes that, in the real Ferryland, in his real childhood, he had been happy as he never had been since and never would be again, that he wished that he had never left the place, never gotten older and been drawn into chasing after what, in the grown-up, modern world, the world of cities, careers, competition, disappointment, nepotism and betrayal, was thought to be important. He had no business living anywhere but in that town beside the sea, no business pursuing any sort of life but the one that he’d been born to, impossible though it was for him to return to it, impossible for so many reasons, us foremost among them.
five
It was a requirement of Jennie’s that we say the rosary every night after supper in the kitchen. After the ripping in, a week of rosaries went by as usual, all of us kneeling on the floor, each leaning on a chair. Dad always did so under protest, which he expressed either with an ironic sigh or a roll of the eyes or by saying something to the effect that he was not going to beg a non-existent God to go easy on his non-existent soul in a non-existent afterlife. And Jennie always reacted by telling us that Dad was just joking, that it was because he was so scared stiff of God that he pretended to disbelieve in His existence. Besides, she said, praying was not begging.
Dad said it sounded like begging to him. Pray for us sinners. Lead us not into temptation. Have mercy. With a sigh that said he knew as well as she did that there was no chance that he would not relent, she waited for him to kneel at his chair, which he did at last.
There was something so sad and solemn about saying the rosary in the failing light of evening, the interruption into my life of an awareness of something nebulous but terrifying, limiting, ultimate, something that would prevail over all else no matter what I did.
More than once, during the rosary that week, I fell into a coughing fit so bad I had to be excused and sent to the bunk room, where Jennie closed the door behind me.
When it was Dad’s turn to lead, he either recited so fast that it sounded like gibberish or assumed a tone of irony and a faint imitation of Father McGettigan’s high-pitched voice until Jennie shot him a look.
* * *
Then came one of the times we all dreaded.
On the last night of November, there was a lightning storm that was especially severe. I was awake on the bedmobile in the living room, reading Tom Sawyer by the light of a single lamp, when Jennie came running out of the bedroom in her pajamas, shouting as if she was still in the middle of a nightmare. “Come on, come on, into the kitchen now, now.”
I heard Dad call out from his bed that he was staying put. Before she could tell me to, I joined Jennie in running about the house, drawing all the curtains closed, turning off whatever lights were on, unplugging whatever was plugged in, exhorting my brothers to find their prayer beads, go to the kitchen and kneel down. I was her partner in panic.
As thunder crashed directly overhead, she screamed, “Merciful God,” and put her hands over her ears.
“It’s only a storm,” Dad shouted. But Jennie ran every which way, calling for us at every flash of blue or crash of thunder until Ken, Craig and Brian came out of the bunk room and Dad from the bedroom and they all pitched in to storm-proof the house, Dad swearing every time he ripped a cord from the wall.
Then we gathered in the darkness of the kitchen, where, after Jennie lit a candle and put it on the table, we knelt and Jennie began the rosary. Brian and I were more upset by her terror than by the storm, Brian crying, me coughing.
“It’s just a warm front moving in,” Dad said when it came his turn to lead. “It’s not the wrath of God.” Then lightning flashed and deafening claps of thunder followed and Jennie covered her face with her hands and dropped her head onto her chair, crying and unable to take her turn. It went on like this until the worst of the storm had passed.
Dad helped Jennie to her feet and put his arms around her as she buried her head in the crook of his neck.
“Boys,” Dad said, “plug everything back in and open the curtains.”
We did as he said, none of us making eye contact. When we got back to the kitchen, Dad wasn’t holding Jennie anymore and she’d stopped crying but was still wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands, smiling sheepishly.
As I knew he would because he always did, he ripped into her: What good did she think it did to close the curtains? Did she think that the curtains kept us safe? Did she think every other family in the Goulds was doing this?
Maybe, she said.
Lightning and the Goulds had been around long before her, and the Goulds had managed to survive. Did she know of anyone in the Goulds being hurt by lightning?
She said no, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.
He said, so they were secretly hit by lightning?
She said houses could be blown apart by lightning.
He said it was all over the Goulds in an hour if someone broke a window, but a family had somehow kept it a secret that their house had been blown apart by lightning? He said we were safe because we were indoors. The house was grounded. She didn’t have to scare the living daylights out of the boys, especially Wayne, who, one of these nights, would cough up his lungs while the rest of us were busy saying prayers.
Jennie, her arms now tightly folded, said she couldn’t help it. Dad said that was because she didn’t understand what thunder and lightning were. God wasn’t playing target practice with lightning bolts, and Satan wasn’t pounding on a giant set of drums. She didn’t need to run around the house like a madwoman, waking everybody up, as if she just heard on TV that the world would end unless every one of the Johnstons got out of bed.
Jennie again said she couldn’t help it, sounding more chastised than he did when she ripped into him. He said he was wasting his breath, because that woman across the road, her mother, Lucy, Lucy, had crammed her head with superstitious nonsense. Who in the name of God put up a statue of the Blessed Virgin in their house? In their house, for Christ’s sake, where Wayne spent more time than he did in his own. No wonder Wayne had turned out as he had.
At that, Jennie finally began to fight back. He should leave Lucy out of it, because where would we be, where would he be, without Lucy, who didn’t charge a cent for taking care of Wayne while they were at work, not that he could take care of Wayne, because who could do that and pay off the mortgage of the Crystal Palace? If it wasn’t for Lucy, we wouldn’t even be able to afford the shack we had wound up in.
Thunder and lightning, he said, ignorance and superstition, magic, black magic, ghosts and Holy Ghosts and archangels the size of galaxies, wart- and cancer-curing Holy Water, all mixed up with fairies and witches and sprites and goblins, and toadstools, which, by the way, was another term for frog shit. This was what she inherited from Lucy. People rising from the dead. Three days dead and Christ comes back to life smelling and looking like he just got back from the barber and then took a bath before putting on a brand-new set of custom-fitting robes.
“Stop it!” Jennie said.
Dad said he was going back to bed before a rumble of distant thunder inspired her to have another go at the rosary.
