“Charlie,” Pop said. “How much arm you got on you?”
“Huh?”
“You know something, Charlie-boy, you been getting awful big for your britches lately. So I was wondering how much arm you got on you. Wondering if you think you can put your old man’s arm down.” He smiled playfully, and Charlie grinned.
“Why? You want to arm wrestle?”
“‘Why? You want to arm wrestle?’”the man mimicked the boy. “Of course I want to arm wrestle. Just to set you right on who’s still the boss here, who says when we go in and so forth. Come on,” he said, “let’s go,” and he rolled up his right sleeve.
Charlie looked around him. “Where?”
“Right here. On the saw.” Our father reached under the steel tabletop and cranked down the jagged eight-inch blade, made it disappear below the slot, so that the flat of the table was waist-high between him and Charlie. He leaned over and placed the point of his right elbow on the table next to the blade slot, his hand open and grasping at air.
“Come on, let’s go,” the man said, grinning. “Keep your elbow the other side of the blade slot, though. You cross it, you lose. And keep your other hand behind your back, like I am,” he said, and he grandly swung his left hand behind him and smacked it against the small of his back. “You’re not allowed to hold on to anything for leverage.”
“You worried, Pop?” Charlie looked over at Wade and smiled and rolled his eyes. Both boys knew that the man was going to beat him easily, which made Pop’s obsession with the rules of the game amusing: it was one of the few aspects of his character that they liked, this occasional pointless fastidiousness, which may have been all he had for a moral code. Whenever the family saw him subject himself to it, we were comforted.
“Shit no. No, I’m not worried. I just don’t want you claiming later that I didn’t beat you fair and square. Right’s right, boy. For both of us. So come on, let’s get to it,” Pop said, and he smiled warmly into his son’s round face.
Charlie rolled up his sleeve and placed his right elbow on the steel table. “Cold,” he observed, and he grabbed Pop’s hand. They were the same height, Charlie maybe an inch or two taller, but the boy was skinnier than the man, and his arm and hand were still a boy’s.
“Wade, you give the signal,” Pop said, and Wade came around to stand at the end of the table, like an umpire. “You ready to get whipped, Charlie?” the man asked.
“Yep.”
Wade said, “One. Two. Three. Go.”
The man’s arm stiffened, and the muscles and ligaments swelled, as the boy pulled on it with his own. Our father smiled and said, “You know what they call this where I come from?”
Charlie was holding his breath and trying with all his strength to pull our father’s arm off the vertical; he could not speak: he shook his head no.
“Twisting wrists,” the man said, calmly, as if he were talking to his son on the phone. Then he slowly twisted the boy’s hand in his and drew it a few inches toward him and smiled again. He was not only stronger than his son, he was smarter.
But suddenly Charlie twisted back, surprising our father, and he found himself able to draw the man’s bulging arm a few inches toward his own chest, off the vertical, and then he twisted his wrist back the other way and discovered that he had leverage on the man, and instead of pulling on his arm, he was pushing it.
Wade was thrilled, astonished, and then he was frightened, and he imagined the saw blade coming up, whirring between their elbows, rising slowly as they grunted over it, inching closer and closer to where their arms joined at the wrists. He wanted them to let go, to let their clasped hands come unglued, before they were sliced neatly apart by the saw. He took a step back from the table and tried to look away from his father and brother, but he could not move his gaze.
Pop still smiled, but now it seemed forced, pasted onto his face. “You … think … you got … me … eh?” he said, as he fought back against the force of his son’s arm, shoulder, back and legs, for now Charlie believed that he actually might beat our father in this game, and he had thrown his entire body into it. He said nothing, kept pushing down on our father’s declining arm.
The rain fell against the roof of the barn; the swallows chuckled in the rafters. Down below, in the center of the open space between the lofts and stalls, the two bent figures faced each other intently over a small steel table, while Wade stood at the end of the table, bearing witness.
Wade suddenly clapped his hands together and blurted, “Come on, Charlie! Come on!”
Our father looked over at Wade and glared, and he redoubled his effort, twisting Charlie’s wrist and hand back toward him, then quickly away, so that he was able to shift the strain on his own arm and start to pull with the full strength of his bicep and shoulder, drawing the boy’s arm slowly back to a vertical position, where once again their clasped hands were held suspended above the slot that hid the blade of the saw.
They stayed there, each unable to move the other, the veins in their foreheads standing out, faces and arms reddening from the effort. Neither of them smiled or said a word. They grunted now and again, and their breath came in hard gasps.
Then Charlie’s other hand, the left, wandered back toward the table, as if curious and a little stupid, and it lay on the table palm down. And when Pop saw it there, he said, “Hold it! Hold it!” He let go of Charlie’s right hand and lifted his elbow off the table and stood up straight. He brushed his hair back with both hands and said, “You cheated. It’s a default.”
Charlie looked at his left hand in disgust. “Aw, c’mon, Pop, I could’ve just put it back. All you had to do was say. I didn’t get no advantage.”
“Sorry, Charlie. Rules is rules, m’ boy,” Pop said, and he smiled cheerfully, turned and walked out the huge open door and peered up at the sky. “Still raining,” he called back, “and looks like it’s going to keep on. I’m going in, where it’s warm,” he said, and he hitched up his baggy pants and disappeared from view.
The boys were silent for a moment. Charlie said, “I could have beat him, you know. I was beating him.”
“Yeah.”
“He knows it, too. He knows I was beating him.”
“Yeah. He does.”
“The bastard.”
“Yeah. The bastard.”
They stood in the middle of the barn floor a few minutes longer, listening to the rain and the swallows and staring out the rear of the barn, which was wide open to the dark-gray sky and the meadow and pinewoods at the far side of the building, where they had ripped down all the boards. They knew that now the job would never be done, that tomorrow our father would find other things for himself to do and other chores for them, and the barn would stay the way it was, its ribs and spine exposed to the weather, the rest slowly rotting off, as rain blew in and snow fell. It would be like a huge long-dead animal come upon in the woods when the snow melts, half in the ground and half out, half bones and half flesh and fur, and when you walk up on it, you see what it is and remember what it was, and you look away.
14
LILLIAN WANTED TO SEE Wade’s face, but he kept as much of it as he could out of sight: he wore sunglasses and a Red Sox cap pulled down low, and as he drove he kept glancing out the window on his left and talked to her without looking at her. They were on the way to the Riverside Cemetery, their regular Sunday afternoon visit to her father’s grave, and Wade had picked her up at her aunt Alma’s, as usual, right after lunch. It was a bright sunny day with a cloudless blue sky and high dry air, and in spite of the somber occasion, Lillian had come out of her aunt’s house whistling a song from South Pacific.