His legs felt like sand, and his hands were trembling. Quickly, he replaced the sunglasses; he looked through them and out over the hood of the car and held on to the steering wheel with both hands, as if he were driving at great speed. Outside the open window, the soft wind blew, and the sun was shining; the meadow grass glowed green and gold, and from the pine trees at the far side of the cemetery, the same pair of jays called.
Lillian reached both hands toward Wade’s face, and when, without looking at her, he pulled away, she dropped her hands back to her lap and studied them for a second. She said, “I don’t … I don’t understand.” She looked at his face again. “You mean, he hit you?” She could not picture it, could not visualize any scene in which Wade, who seemed so large and male to her, so impregnable, like a stone wall, could be struck and hurt by his father, who was actually smaller than Wade and seemed old and fragile compared to him.
Wade said, “Yes. He hit me.”
“How could he … do that? I don’t understand, Wade.”
“Simple. He just hit me. He does that.”
“What … what about your mother?”
“She doesn’t hit me.”
“I mean, doesn’t she … stop him? Can’t she say something?”
Wade barked a laugh. “Sure. She can say any damned thing she wants. So long as she doesn’t mind getting belted for it herself.”
“I … I don’t understand, Wade.”
“I know you don’t,” he said.
She was silent for a second, and then suddenly she was weeping, tears running down her cheeks, and she felt so sorry for this boy that she thought she would break. “Oh, Wade, couldn’t you stop him? Why? Why did he do that? It’s awful,” she said, and she reached once again for him, and again he cringed and pulled away, but this time she persisted, placing one hand on his shoulder and with the fingertips of her other hand touching his cheek and then removing the sunglasses. She caught her breath at the sight of him, and said, “Oh-h!”
He let her examine him, as if he were a sideshow freak, and said nothing. He drew his cigarettes from his shirt pocket and with trembling hand lit one and inhaled deeply. See the freak smoke a cigarette. See his hand shake. See how his lips and mouth function normally, while the rest of his face is misshapen and discolored. Read this map of pain and humiliation.
He said quietly, “Bang, bang, bang,” and then he, too, was weeping, great wrenching sobs surging from his stomach and chest, and he brought his face forward and placed his forehead against the cool rim of the steering wheel.
Lillian wrapped her arms around his shoulders. How she hated that man Glenn Whitehouse, who had done this awful thing to a boy. Wade was a boy to her at this moment, a child injured by his parent and betrayed and abandoned at the deepest level imaginable. She knew, too, that Wade’s pain went on and on, way beyond her imaginings, for she had never been beaten by her father or mother, and though her father may indeed have never drawn a sober breath, as everyone in town said, he had also never raised his hand, or even his voice, against anyone. Her father was weak and sweet, and he had not frightened a soul. The most alarming moments she had endured with her father came on those rare occasions when she realized that, if he was not drunk, he was thinking about getting drunk and so was not in fact present to her, did not actually see or hear her in the room. Those moments made her feel as if she did not exist and so lonely that she got dizzy and had to sit down and babble to him, make him lift his head and smile benignly at her, a big sleepy horse of a man, while she chattered on about school, about her sisters and her mother, making up events and whole conversations with neighbors, teachers, friends, madly filling with words the hole in the universe that he made with his presence, until, at last, her father rose from the kitchen table, patted her on the head and said, “I love you a whole lot, Lily, a whole lot,” and went out the door, leaving her alone in the kitchen, a speck of bright matter whirling through a dark turbulent sky. And now her father was dead, and she believed that she did not feel that pain anymore, because she missed him so.
They sat in Wade’s car for a long time, while the sun moved across the summer sky and touched the topmost branches of the trees and the air began to cool. In a quiet dispassionate voice, Wade tried telling it to her as if it had happened to someone else. It was the only way he could tell it without crying.
He had come home last night late, after having gone to the movies in Littleton with Lillian, where they had stopped by for a short visit with her mother and stepfather and her sisters, and when he got home and had walked into the kitchen, tired, sleepy, head still buzzing with memories of his and his girlfriend’s hot good-night kisses, he had been greeted by the sight of his mother, hair wildly streaming, in her flannel nightdress, rushing across the room to him. She was terrified, eyes red from crying, arms extended, and she swiftly got behind Wade, between his bulky body and the closed door, and wrapped her arms around his middle and clung to him.
Pop sat at the kitchen table with a smile on his face that the boy found oddly calming: Nothing is wrong, it said. But Ma was sobbing hysterically, clutching him from behind, and suddenly Wade was afraid of his father’s smile. Nothing is wrong, it continued saying. We men understand how women are: hysterical, weird. She will calm down in a minute, and you will see that she is all worked up over nothing again.
Wade turned his back on his father and held his mother to him, wrapping her in his arms and smothering her sob against his chest. “What happened?” Wade asked her. “What happened, Ma? What’s the matter?”
He heard Pop growl, “That is none of your goddamned business, mis-ter.” He was drunk, mean drunk, dangerous as a trapped animal. Far more than the sight of his mother crazed, it was the way his father spoke, the way he emphasized the wrong words in his sentence — the first, “that,” and the last, “mis-ter,” hanging on to it, savoring its flavor — that set off Wade’s alarms and made him stiffen with fear.
Wade glanced back over his shoulder and made sure Pop was still seated at the table: he was pouring himself a drink from the bottle of Canadian Club. Wade saw through the doorway beyond into the living room, and huddled at the bottom of the stairs at the far side of the room were his little brother Rolfe and his sister Lena in pajamas. Lena sucked her thumb ferociously, and Rolfe, without smiling, flipped a wave to his brother.
“Come on, Ma,” Wade said, “let’s just call it a night, okay? Come on,” he said gently, turning her toward the door into the living room. “Why don’t you ease on to bed now, okay? I’ll be right here.” He heard his father snort.
“He just starts picking on me,” Ma cried. “Picking and picking, over nothing. Nothing.” She shuffled a few steps toward the door. Wade had one arm around her tiny shoulders and held one of her hands with the other, as if inviting her onto the dance floor.
Slowly, carefully, he moved her out of the room, while she continued to talk brokenly. “It starts with nothing, nothing … and he, he gets mad at me. It was only for supper, he was mad because the casserole … it was a nice supper, it was, but he was late, so we ate without him. You know, you were here. He was late, and the casserole got all dried out, and he was mad because we didn’t wait for him. I explained, Wade, I told him you had a movie date and all, and he was late.”
Wade said, “I know, I know. It’s all right now.” He tried to hush her as they moved one small step at a time across the living room toward the door to the bedroom, Uncle Elbourne’s room, they still called it, after all these years, as if our mother and father had never taken true possession of it, even though they had conceived all but one of their children in that room.