“And then when I try to argue with him … all I did was try to explain, but he just gets madder and madder and starts yelling at me for all kinds of things. About money, and you kids. Wade, he blames me for everything! Nothing I say … nothing I say, …”
“I know, Ma,” Wade said. “It’s okay now, it’s over.” They entered the darkened bedroom, and Wade turned on the lamp on the dresser by the door and closed the door behind them. He eased her over to the bed, drew back the covers, and when she had climbed into the bed, brought the blankets back over her. She looked like a sick child, her fingers clutching at the top of the blankets, her face looking mournfully up at him: so helpless and frail, so confused, so pathetically dependent, that — though he wanted to weep for her — he was filled instead with terror: he knew that he could not help her but had to try.
He whispered, “Did he hit you, Ma? Did Pop hit you?”
She shook her head no, turned down her mouth and stuck out her lower lip and started crying.
“Ma, he didn’t hit you, did he? Tell me the truth.” Her face didn’t show any evidence of having been hit, but that did not mean much, Wade knew. He could have hit her someplace where it would not show.
She caught her breath and said in a whisper, “No. No, he hasn’t done that in a long time. He stopped … he stopped doing that. Not since that last time … with you, when you got fresh. Oh, you poor thing!” she said, and she started crying again.
Wade said, “He hasn’t done it since then? What about the other kids? I’m not here a lot, you know.”
“You boys are all too big now,” she said.
“No, I mean Rolfe and Lena.” He looked back nervously at the closed door.
She shook her head. “No. He doesn’t do that now.”
“You’re sure?” Wade did not believe her. “What about tonight?”
She looked up at him, and her eyes filled again. “I thought … I was afraid. I thought he was going to do it again,” she said. “That’s when you came in. He had his fist up, he was going to do it. Just because … I was all upset, he was saying terrible things, things about me. I know it’s just the alcohol in him that’s talking and I shouldn’t react, but I can’t help it, the things he says upset me so, and I start crying and answering back, and that’s what he can’t stand. Answering back. Questioning his authority. He loses his temper.”
“What did he say?” Wade asked; then he said, “No, never mind. I don’t want to know. He’s drunk. It doesn’t matter what he said, does it?” He smiled down at her and patted her hands. “You try to sleep now. Everything’s over now. He’ll be off on some other tangent, and in a minute he’ll be hollering at me for coming in late. You watch,” Wade said, and he smiled.
He backed away from the bed and, still facing her, turned out the light, then reached behind him for the doorknob, opened the door and stepped out, closing it carefully, quietly, as if she had already fallen asleep. He looked over at his little sister and brother and flapped the backs of both hands for them to scoot upstairs to bed. Somberly, they obeyed and were gone.
When Wade returned to the kitchen, Pop was standing by the sink, studying the half-filled glass in his hand as if he’d spotted a crack in it. “You get an earful?” he asked Wade.
“What do you mean?”
“‘What do you mean?’ You know what I mean. Did you get an earful?”
Wade stood on the other side of the table with his arms folded across his chest. He said, “Listen, Pop, I don’t care what you guys fight about, it’s your business. I just don’t want—”
“What? You just don’t want what? Let’s hear it.” He put the glass down on the counter next to him and glared at his son. “Pissant,” he said.
Wade took in a deep breath. “I guess I just don’t want you to ever hit her again.”
Pop stepped forward suddenly and said, “Guess. You guess.” He moved toward the table, then around it on the right, and Wade swiftly moved around it on the left, until they had reversed positions — Wade had his back to the kitchen sink, and his father was on the other side of the table, with his back to the door.
“She tell you I hit her?” Glenn said. “She tell you that?”
“I’m not talking about tonight. I’m talking about the future. And the past doesn’t matter. That’s all,” Wade added weakly. “The future.”
“You’re telling me? You are trying to tell me what I’m supposed to be afraid of? You think I’m afraid of you?” He showed his large teeth and made a quick move toward Wade, and when Wade jumped, he stopped and folded his arms over his chest and laughed. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “What a candy-ass.”
Without thinking it, Wade reached behind him into the dishrack, and his hand wrapped itself, as if of its own volition, around the handle of the skillet, heavy, black, cast iron, and he lifted it free of the rack and swung it around in front of him. The sound of his heart pounded in his ears like a hammer against steel, and he heard his voice, high and thin in the distance, say to his father, “If you touch her or me, or any of us, again, I’ll fucking kill you.”
His father quietly said, “Jesus.” He sounded like a man who had just broken a shoelace.
“I mean it. I’ll kill you.” He lifted the skillet in his right hand and held it out and just off his shoulder, like a Ping-Pong paddle, and he suddenly felt ridiculous.
Without hesitation, Pop walked quickly around the table, came up to his son and punched him straight in the face, sending the boy careening back against the counter and the skillet to the floor. Grabbing him by his shirtfront, Pop hauled the boy back in front of him and punched him a second time and a third. A fourth blow caught him square on the forehead and propelled him along the counter to the corner of the room, where he stood with his hands covering his face. “Come on!” his father said, and he advanced on him again. “Come on, fight back like a man! Come on, little boy, let’s see what you’re made of!”
Wade yanked his hands away and thrust his face open-eyed at his father and cried, “I’m not made of what you’re made of!” and Pop hit him again, slamming Wade’s head back against the wall. Wade covered his face with his hands once more, and he began to cry.
Pop turned away in disgust. “You sure as shit ain’t,” he said, and he walked over to the door, where he turned back to Wade and said, “Next time you start telling your father what to do and what not to do, make goddamned sure you can back it up, buddy-boy.” Then he went out, slamming the door behind him.
Wade let himself slide slowly down to the floor, where he sat with his legs straight out, his head slumped on one shoulder, his arms flopped across his lap — a marionette with its strings cut.
It was like being asleep, he told Lillian, only he was not really sleeping. He did not know how long he remained there on the floor — hours, maybe — but at some point he heard his father’s pickup turn into the yard. He got up from the floor, wobbly-legged, and quickly made his way to the stairs, and by the time he heard his father bump his way into the kitchen, Wade was standing in the darkness in the middle of his bedroom. He listened to the man’s clumsy drunken movements below, heard him at last go into Uncle Elbourne’s room and close the door. Then, slowly, his face on fire, Wade took off his shirt and jeans and loafers and socks and got into his bed.