Our sister, Lena, suffered only her father’s verbal assaults, so Wade knew she could not possibly understand. It was bad for her, but different. And though he sometimes wanted to warn me, now seven and not yet beaten by the man, Wade felt somehow that if no one spoke of it, if no one acknowledged it, then it might never happen again. It might turn out to be ancient history.
As for his older brothers, they seemed to Wade to regard our father’s occasional, predictable and, for the most part, avoidable attacks as just one more of the many brutalities of our life so far, as one small corner of the rough terrain of childhood, something we were supposed to endure and then pass through and become scornful of, which was why, goddammit, Elbourne had gone, and next month Charlie was going, straight into the army without even waiting to graduate from high school. So that if Wade had spoken of it to them, he would only have been pointing out his inadequacies, revealing to his older brothers, as to himself, his lesser status as a human being.
Besides, for Wade, even when he believed he was thinking clearly about it, the beatings were still too confusing and complicated to talk about with Elbourne and Charlie. All Elbourne would say is, “Don’t come to me with your problems, Wade. You’re big enough now to wipe the floor with the sonofabitch, if you want to. Do like I did. After that, believe me, he’ll never lay a hand on you.” And Charlie would say, “You don’t even have to wipe the floor with him, you just got to make him think you’re willing to. Like I did. After that, he’ll back off. Remember?” And Wade did remember.
It was four years earlier, and one spring weekend our father decided to save the barn, which had been falling down for a decade, by tearing off the fallen part and rebuilding the rest with whatever timbers and boards he could salvage from the half-collapsed back loft and the old cow stalls below. The framing timbers were still for the most part unrotted, and many of the aged wide pine boards, silvery gray and bearded with splinters, were reusable, and our father’s notion of shortening the barn by thirty feet and squaring up the rest, with no expenditure except for nails, was an attractive one — even to his sons, who knew they would have to provide the free labor.
Elbourne got out of it — he was sixteen and had a weekend job already, pumping gas for Chub Merritt, but Charlie, who was fourteen then and large for his age, had nothing better to do on a cloudy April Saturday, and Wade, though only twelve, was able to pull nails and haul boards and timbers alongside a grown man. I have no memory of the event. I was too young to help in any way and probably stayed inside the whole day.
Wade and Charlie liked the idea: the barn had been ugly to them for years, an embarrassment, even before the roof had collapsed at the rear from the weight of the snow one particularly bad winter, and they had learned to avert their gaze from the decrepit leaning unpainted structure, to pretend that it was not sagging there in the lot between the house and the woods. Now they could look at it and imagine a crisply squared handsome old barn made tight against the weather and clean enough inside to use as a garage and workshop.
Pop had told them at breakfast, “I figure a couple, three weekends is all, and we’ll have us a brand-new barn built out of the old one. We can store a winter’s wood in it then, and you boys want to work on some goddamned old clunker there, no problem.”
Wade and Charlie had gone out to the barn and had started ripping off and hauling boards from the back to the front before Pop had even finished breakfast: it was rare that people in the Whitehouse family worked on something together, and each of the boys was secretly pleased by the chance to work alongside his father and brother on a project that so clearly would benefit them all. In a short while, Pop had joined them, had set up his table saw a short ways outside the barn door and was cutting the boards to size and nailing them over old gaps and holes. He was no carpenter, but it was not a difficult job, and by noon they could see a difference: most of the skeleton of the rear half of the barn had been exposed, and most of the holes in the front had been covered over.
They broke for lunch, leftover macaroni and cheese, and the boys sat at the table so they could look over Pop’s wispy red hair and out the window behind him to the barn, and while they ate they kept glancing up to admire what they had done so far. They finished eating before Pop did and returned to work, and when he joined them he was lugging a six-pack of Schlitz, which he set on the ground next to his table saw. He popped open the first and said, “Might’s well make this enjoyable.” He said it glumly, as if he believed it was impossible to make anything enjoyable.
The boys said nothing. They looked at each other, then resumed pulling down the boards and knocking out the bent rusted nails and hauling the boards forward and stacking them neatly a few feet from the saw, where Pop went on measuring, and trimming them and nailing them into place. A cutting breeze had come up, and the smooth gray sky had roughened and lowered somewhat. At one point, the saw stopped its whine, and Wade heard the wind hiss through the pines, reminding him of winter, and he suddenly smelled wood smoke. He looked over at the house and saw a silver ribbon of smoke unravel from the chimney and knew that Ma had started a fire in the kitchen stove, and for the first time that day he wished he were not doing what he was doing.
Then it started to rain, a cold prickly windblown rain, and Pop hollered for the boys to come help him haul the table saw and extension cord inside the barn. They got the saw inside, and the three of them stood silently in the cold gloom and listened to the rain drum against the roof. Ancient rotted hay in the lofts overhead smelled sourly of failure and disappointment to all three of them, and Pop polished off the last of the six-pack and said, “Fuck it, let’s call it a day.”
“Maybe it’ll stop in a few minutes,” Charlie said. Besides, he pointed out, the extension cord to the house was long enough for them to run the saw inside the barn as well as out, and a lot of the boards and some of the framing could be pulled down without going out in the rain.
Pop rummaged through his jacket pocket and pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. The familiar smell of the cigarette relaxed Wade, and he leaned back against the wall and inhaled and wished he were old enough to carry his own cigarettes. He had smoked numerous times at school, and he liked it, liked the taste and smell, the way it made him slightly dizzy for a few seconds, then calm, and he liked the way he thought a butt dangling from his mouth made him look — like a grown man. But he knew that if he started carrying his own cigarettes around and pulling one out and smoking it at times like this, Pop would not object; he would only laugh at him.
Above them, swallows made a quiet gurgling sound from somewhere in the mossy darkness of the rafters, and Wade remembered summer afternoons, when the hay was dry and not so ancient and sour as now, wrestling in the lofts with his older brothers, the three boys pretending they were pirates boarding a Spanish galleon, where they fought in the rigging over the division of the spoils: the jewels for Elbourne, the doubloons for Charlie, and for Wade … whatever was left over. He tried dollars, and they laughed at him for his stupidity, no dollars in those days; he tried watches and rings, and Charlie said those were jewels; and so somehow he got his pick of the women, which seemed like nothing worthwhile to him, so he refused, and before he knew why or how, he was made to walk the plank, his brothers behind him poking him with their wooden swords, as, blindfolded, he edged his way along a beam high up in the barn, felt the end of it with his toes, stopped, got shoved from behind by the point of one of the swords and was falling through space, in blackness pitching into the hay, scratchy and full of dust, hugging him like a huge pillow.