Joe
GETTING BETTER WASN’T EASY. MY ENTIRE RIGHT SIDE pained me from the
moment I woke in the morning until I laid my head down at night. And even then, it haunted my sleep, sneaking into my dreams, transforming them into nightmares full of screeching tires and the sound of hospital machines. It was a deep-down pain, one that no amount of exercise and medication could cast out. No matter how many pills I fed it or how many of Aunt Lindy’s “thimbles” full of whiskey I drank, I was convinced that pain would haunt me for the rest of my life. I was so sure of this that I did everything I could to prove myself right. A man determined is one thing, and more often than not, a good thing. But a man soured on life at twenty- four and determined to stew in that sourness is never a good thing. The pain only made my anger quicker to ignite. Mom tried to love the anger out of me, Dad and Ben tried to work it out of me by taking me into the woods, and Mae tried to curse it out, but all that came to nothing. I was determined to let that pain and anger ruin me.
In the months after the accident, alone in my tiny room at the rehab centre in Halifax with nothing but books that smelled of mildew for company, I desperately needed someone to blame. And I decided that someone was going to be Mr. Richardson, the poor soul who’d been driving home to dinner when I stepped out of the dark and into the front of his truck.
“You’ve got no reason to be mad at him,” Mom said. She was sitting beside my hospital bed, taking bread out of an old margarine container. “How was he supposed to see you?”
“He should’ve been looking.”
“On a Sunday night? For a boy stepping out of the dark? He was supposed to know that you were gonna walk out in front of him?” She placed the bread on the narrow hospital table and moved it in front of me before she poured molasses over top. “Luski, eat.”
The bread was still warm, and the molasses dripped down the side and pooled around the bottom. I used my finger to slop some of it into my mouth, dripping it on my chin. Mom reached up to wipe it and I slapped her hand away.
“That’s the last time you’ll do that.” She reached up again to wipe the thick brown syrup off my chin and I let her. “You’re not so banged up that I’ll let you get away with slapping your mother.”
On a good day, when the exercises alleviated the pain, and the winter weather lifted and I could go outside and sit in the sun, I could find a little bit of forgiveness for Mr. Richardson. He didn’t require it and I had no right to give it, but I still found it—on the good days. On the bad days, when the weather turned on me and the snow fell and the cold sank into my bones— even though the weather was banished to the outside and I was imprisoned on the inside—on the days when the exercises hurt more than they helped and the pills weren’t enough, my anger festered and grew. The longer I had to lie in that bed in Halifax looking at feet that wouldn’t do what I wanted, the longer I had to stew in my own circumstance, the angrier I got. Maybe that man from the supply store in Maine all those years ago was right. Maybe we Indians were sour. Or maybe it was just me.
I spent six months in rehab, six long months waiting for my body to relearn all those things I needed it to do. I missed the deer hunt with Dad and I missed Christmas. When winter descended, it kept my family at home, which was three hours away on a good day. The sun was returning to the world when I was well enough to leave, walking with the help of a cane, stiff and sore all the hours of the day. I took to sneaking sips of Dad’s whiskey to keep the pain at bay.
“You’ve been sitting there moping for hours. You’re gonna get all stiff if you don’t move soon.” Mae stood over me, hand on hip.
“Leave me be, Mae. I’m tired.” I settled further into the chair and tried to look past her out the big living room window, but she wasn’t moving.
“The doctor says you need to be exercising. Get off your ass and walk to the end of the driveway and back. And don’t think I haven’t noticed you sneaking drinks, ’cause I have.”
“Leave me alone, Mae. I don’t need a lecture from you right now.” “Stop feeling so sorry for yourself.”
I tried to look around her and she moved with me, blocking my view. She held out her hand to help me out of the chair and I slapped it away. Turns out, I was just as sour at home as I’d been at the rehab centre. The familiar sounds and smells of home did nothing to improve my temperament. And I just kept on being a pain for those who loved me.
“You like to find fault with everyone but your own self.” The fire was warm in the cool April evening as Mae sat down, the old stump between us.
“Shut it, Mae. You don’t know nothing.”
“I won’t shut it and I know more than you do. That accident knocked your head around good, I guess. You blame that poor man when you were the one who stepped out in front of him. You probably scared the daylights right out of him and he’s an old man, Joe. It’s the worst kind of self-pity. Blaming someone else because of something you did.”
“Screw off, Mae.”
“Oh, big man now, eh?” She snickered. Cursing at Mae was like throwing gas on a fire.
“You spend all your time feelin’ bad for yourself instead of trying to get better. And you want the rest of us to go along with it. You’re hurting Mom. She won’t tell you, but you’re hurting her.”
“I’m not hurting Mom.”
“She’s scared, Joe. Scared she’s gonna lose another kid. And you are doing everything you can to feed that fear. Sitting around here, stewing. Not doing your exercises, face as glum as a dead mummy.”
“All mummies are dead, idiot.”
Mae sniffed. “You think you’re so smart, and yet all you’re doing is sitting here being a dumb-ass. Not doing anything to get yourself better and won’t even talk about your own guilt in it all.”
I could feel my face getting warm as my heart moved from my chest into my throat and threatened to pulse its way right out of my mouth.
“I have guilt, Mae.” I wasn’t yelling but I was close. “And you should.”
“I was the last one to see Ruthie. I was the one who lost her. I got guilt, Mae. Don’t tell me I don’t have guilt. Maybe not where you think it should be, but I got guilt.”
Mae was quiet for a minute. She watched her own hands as she rolled a cigarette. The fire cracked and spit as she licked the edge of the paper and folded it over, securing the tobacco in place. She took a deep breath before she brought down the truth.
“You hold on to that like some sort of badge. Like you’re special for it or something.” She pointed the unlit cigarette at me. “You’re not special because you were the last to see her. Just like you ain’t special because you were there when Charlie died.” She stopped like she was trying to think of something else to say. “You’re not special for those things, Joe. They were just things that happened when you were there.”
“Mae—”
She put her hand up to stop me and I stopped. She hurled the cigarette she’d rolled into the fire, unsmoked.
“Being the last one to see Ruthie is a guilt you have no right holding on to all by yourself. We all got a part in it. And you thinking you’re so special only makes it worse for the rest of us. You ain’t special, Joe, and I’m sick of tiptoeing around you like you’re going to break. Grow the fuck up.”
Wisdom is earned, I’ve heard said, and for the most part, I believe that to be true. But Mae had it from the get-go. Her wisdom wasn’t bound up in fancy words or written down in books. There was nothing elegant about it, and it was thrown out into the world all rough around the edges. But it made a difference. Maybe not that particular night. That night, I went to bed so mad at Mae I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake fuming in the very same bed I sleep in now, decades later. And Mae, she quit speaking to me, but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of being the one to crack. A few weeks later, we found ourselves alone outside, around the same campfire after Mom and Dad had gone off to bed. I’d run out of my pills, and my back had cramped up and I couldn’t stand. I tried but I fell back down into my chair, twice. We sat in silence, the hum of the highway a half-mile off mixing with the sounds of tree frogs and fire slowly reducing itself to ash. As the embers began to blacken, Mae stood up, came over to my side, put her arm around my waist and lifted me up out of my chair. I used her for balance as she led me to bed.
“I’m sorry, Mae,” I said, as she helped me onto the bed.
She bent down to take off my shoes. “Don’t be sorry; be useful.”
That night, as I tried to get comfortable, I decided that maybe Mae was right, although I’d never tell her. If I couldn’t be the same as I was before
the accident, I was at least going to heed her advice and be useful. So, I went into the woods with Dad and Ben, and three months later, when Mr. Richardson came by and repeated his offer of a job, I took it.
There is something about the smell of gasoline that still takes me back to that garage. To a time when I knew the kind of happiness that used to exist before Ruthie disappeared. Back when the family was whole, and the anger lay dormant. I can hear the ticking as the numbers turned over on the fuel gauge, feel the grime that built up thick and dark on the keys of the cash register. Men changing oil, punching numbers. The regulars who stayed too long, to shoot the shit, taking up residence in the cracked vinyl chairs, the smoke from their forgotten cigarettes wafting up out of the ashtray, too busy talking to inhale. I started in late fall as the chill was setting in. It stayed cold all winter. The two bay doors, constantly opening to let one car out and another one in, gave winter a home. You’d find me on a tall stool Monday to Friday, from two in the afternoon until nine in the evening.
I was still prone to bursts of rage. Tiny happenings, ones that no one else would care about, seemed to get my blood all hot and thick. An old- timer, prone to storytelling and deafness, always left his car sitting at the pumps while other customers were trying to gas up. One day in November, a line of cars were backed up to the road, and he stood there telling the same story he’d told a million times. I marched past him, got in his car and gunned it, burning the tires on his Oldsmobile until the whole place stank of burnt rubber. I parked the car on the grass, slammed the door, kicked it and climbed up onto my stool. Everyone was quiet and stared a minute until the old man turned and left. He gassed up in the mornings from that point on.
Then Cora started working the seven-to-two shift. Just as I was coming in, she was leaving. It didn’t take me long to start coming in a little earlier than was required, just so I could talk to her, watch her as she climbed down from the stool and counted her cash. She was petite and had hair that shone red. Cora was almost ten years older than I was, and she looked just like a character out of a children’s book with her freckles scattered over her nose and across her cheekbones, her full lips painted pink every day. Of course, I knew Cora. The town wasn’t so big that you could get away with being complete strangers. But I’d never really talked to her. We celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday on a cool December afternoon just before Christmas.
She was gathering the last piece of cake and the card with money we’d all stuck in it for her when I tried my best to be charming.
“You like your cake?” I asked. “Yeah, it’s nice.”
“It was tasty.” “It was.”
She waited for a minute, maybe to see if I was going to say anything else, but the air in my lungs and every word I ever knew just left me. I’ve never been much of a talker, but I really outdid myself with my awkward silence that day, and every day after that for the next few months.
By the time summer came around, Aunt Lindy’s thimbles of whiskey had become pints of the cheapest I could find. It tasted awful and hurt going down, but after a few swigs, I could bend my legs without wincing. I could crouch down to pick something up and be able to get right back up again. It’s not fair to be young and weak. There’s no fairness to it at all. The pain pills had run out long ago, and sometimes I couldn’t stand it. The pain seemed to radiate out of my bones and poison the muscles. But even under a constant fog, caused either by pain or booze, I always stopped when Cora came through the door. Inspired by a whiskey high one afternoon, I found a bit of courage.
“You want to come to the house with me? We’re having food cooked over the fire Saturday night. My brother, Ben, is home for a bit.”
“Are you asking me out?” The corner of her mouth crept upward into a smile as her head bowed downward. Her red hair hung loose over her eyes. “What are you, twenty-one, twenty-two?”
“I’m twenty-five,” I stammered. “Nearly twenty-six.”
“Well, you’re aging well, Joe. What would we be doing on our date?
Assuming I said yes.”
I couldn’t tell if she was teasing me or being genuine.
“I’m not exactly sure,” I said. “It’s just my family sitting around the fire, having food and a few beers.”
“Now what would the town folk say if they knew I was spending my time with one of you Injuns?”
No one calls us that anymore, at least not in public. Back then, no one thought anything of it. Prejudice runs deep and offers no apologies in small towns.
“They’d say you were a lucky girl.”
“I’ll come by, then.” She smiled full this time, her freckles stretched across her tiny nose.
“How about I come and get you? Saturday around four?”
“I guess that would be okay. But you gotta drive me home, so none of that golden courage I see you sneak.”
“Fair enough. No whiskey. Won’t need it anyway, since I’ll be with you.”
She laughed, grabbed her purse and left out one of the bay doors. Roger, the mechanic, slapped me on the back.
“Good for you, Joe. An older woman. She’ll know how to break you
in.”
WE WERE MARRIED on New Year’s Eve at the Baptist church. My poor mother was so happy I was alive that she conceded to Cora’s Baptist ways. I’d never been devout and I believed in God more out of habit than anything else, so it didn’t matter to me where we got married. But it mattered to Cora. The church was decorated with pine boughs that Dad and Ben had cut, and with wild holly that Cora and her sisters had collected from the ditches. Cora had bought her dress at a second-hand shop, and her mother helped her make it just right.
The church basement was cool and smelled strongly of dust, coffee and church squares, those little homemade sweets coated in sugared coconut and sickly-sweet caramel. No one in Cora’s family drank on account of their religion, so Dad, Ben and I snuck out a few times to toast with some proper whiskey that Dad had bought for the occasion.
“Well, Joe, I’m pleased for you.” Dad held up a small glass under the outside light of the church, the gravestones standing stoic behind him.
“Yeah, good for you, buddy. Finding someone as cute as her to put up with you.” Ben slapped me on the back.
“Thanks. Cora’s a good person. I still can’t quite believe she married me.” I shifted my weight to the left to give my right side some relief. The cold still bothered all the places where bones had broken.
“None of us can.” Mae closed the door behind her and wrapped her shawl tight, but not before she reached down and grabbed the bottle. She took a long swig of the dark liquor. “Warm,” she said, and tried to hide a cough.
“Mae, don’t you ever change.” Dad reached over and pulled her in for a hug. Inside, someone started playing the piano.
“I guess it’s time to go and dance with my wife.” I took the bottle and tipped it up for one last drink before I handed it back to Dad.
The basement was warm and filled with the hum of conversation and quiet laughter. And there was dancing. Looking back now, I think that might have been the happiest moment of my life, that December evening in a church basement.
“Come and dance with me.” Cora took me by the hand and pulled me to the middle of the room. I held her close as her mother, in a very un-Baptist moment, played a love song from a cassette tape.
On New Year’s Day, we moved into a second-storey one-bedroom apartment in town. Cora took a job waitressing at the new Chinese restaurant and quit the gas station. Cora brought Chinese food home for dinner, I tinkered with my car, and I made love to a woman I loved more than my own self. We had no shower, just an old clawfoot bathtub, and I learned to enjoy baths, especially when Cora joined me. We went to my parents’ for dinner and cards on Saturday nights and to her parents’ on Sunday afternoons, after church, for dinner and conversation.
“You’re playing with the devil when you play cards on Sunday,” she explained to me when I suggested it one Sunday afternoon, bored by conversation about family long dead and church gossip. After that, I spent most of those afternoons out in the barn with her father and brother, building or repairing things in the quiet that comes from men who are newly related but don’t have the wherewithal to get to know one another. Occasionally, on Fridays, I’d go out with a few of the boys from school I was still friendly with. A few times, I staggered home and struggled up the stairs to the apartment. Our first real fight happened when I failed to come home at all and she found me passed out at the bottom of the stairs on Saturday morning, on her way to work.
“You can’t stay mad at me. It was one time and I was here the whole time.” I sat at the kitchen table, a mug of black coffee and a bottle of Aspirin in front of me.
“I was worried. Don’t you get that? I didn’t sleep at all last night.” “Not my fault you can’t sleep.”
“I didn’t sleep because I was worried about you, asshole.” She rarely swore and it caught me off guard. “You’re so selfish.”
“Cora, it’s nothing but a bit of fun. It won’t happen all the time. I promise.”
She grabbed her purse off the counter and slammed the door behind her. I swallowed the Aspirin and crawled into bed, fully clothed, stinking of booze.
I drank more Fridays than I should have. A smarter man would have seen that I was ruining the best thing in my life. But I can state, with full confidence, that I am not that clever. Or maybe I’m just one of those people who are only happy when they aren’t. Maybe I find contentment in my own misery. All this knowledge would have helped me so much more when I was young and a fool. It’s a tragedy that we only come to these understandings when we’re too old for them to be useful.
“You’re gonna lose that girl, Joe. I’m telling you, you’d better smarten up.” Dad had stopped in to the garage. He stood by the bubble-gum machine, waiting for a lady driving a Buick to pay and leave. When we were finally alone, he didn’t take time to sugar-coat anything. “Everyone knows you been drinking.”
“Everyone should mind their business. I’m fine, Dad. A little here and there to keep the pain down.” I pretended to be counting the cash in the register, my head down, my hands busy.
“A little? I know Jack at the liquor store, you might remember. He tells me about your ‘little here and there.’”
I’d never been angry with my father. Disappointed sometimes, but never angry. And I never wanted to be, so I was grateful when someone pulled in for gas. I walked past him to the pumps without ever looking him in the eye. He left, his piece said. And by God, if I was any sort of man, I would have listened.
My last day with Cora was a Friday. We’d been married a year and a half already, and while everyone else could see what I was doing to my marriage, I was blind to it. By that Saturday, I was fully aware. There was no way I couldn’t be. I’d left the evidence on Cora’s body.
It was dark and I couldn’t find the light to the stairwell. I stumbled up the first few steps only to lose my balance and fall backwards. As I lay there wondering if I’d broken more bones, the light flicked on. I raised my head to see Cora standing at the top of the stairs, her robe wrapped around her, her face blank.
“Come on and help me up,” I slurred.
“Get up yourself.” She turned and went back into the apartment. I could feel the fingers on my left hand begin to swell, but I wasn’t feeling much of anything else.
“For fuck’s sake, Cora, come fucking help me.” I knew I was waking up the downstairs neighbour, but I didn’t care. Through my haze, I saw Cora come back onto the landing. She threw a blanket at me and turned off the light. That small act, an act I should have recognized as one that showed she maybe still cared, lit the fuse that ignites my anger. There was a soberness that came with the anger, and it propelled me up the stairs and through the door. I stumbled into the kitchen. Cora was at the sink, getting a drink of water. Her calmness, something my poor Mother hoped would rub off on me, angered me even more.
“What the hell, Cora? You’d leave me in the dark?” “It’s summer. You’d survive.”
She didn’t look at me. She walked past me, her glass in her hand, her eyes trained on the bedroom door. Then, my memory gets fuzzy. Not because I don’t remember, but because I don’t want to. Nothing in my life I have ever done, including losing Ruthie and leaving Charlie to the Johnson boys, amounts to the regret and distaste for my own self that I feel about what happened next.
I reached out and hit her hand, sending the glass of water into the air. It came crashing down on the linoleum floor and shattered. Cora screamed, and the fear on her face made me even more angry. I reached out again and grabbed her by the wrist before she had time to move away. With my other hand, balled into a fist, I hit her square in the face. The blood on my hand was warm as I hit her again and then a third time. I heard the bones in her nose break, felt the skin on my knuckles open on her front teeth. I let go of her hand and she fell. She held one hand to her face and the other on the floor to steady herself as shards of glass cut into her knees and hand. I stopped to steady myself against the counter. If she had yelled, if she had fought back, maybe I could have dealt with it, but she didn’t. She sat, crouched on the floor, blood rushing from her nose and mouth, surrounded by broken glass, and she cried. She cried quietly. She didn’t look at me. But I looked at her. I watched her as if I was watching a movie. This wasn’t us. This wasn’t something I could have done. This wasn’t real.
“Cora?” The downstairs neighbour stood at the open door. In his face I saw myself for what I was.
Cora turned and looked at him as I pushed past him and ran down the stairs, stumbling and missing the last two. I ran out into the warm August night and headed for the train tracks. I didn’t get to my parents’ house. I stopped by the pond and I puked. I threw up until there was nothing but acid burning the back of my throat, and then I drank the cool and dirty pond water and threw that up. I lay on the ground and pounded my anger into the dirt. I cried until I passed out. When I woke, the sky was beginning to lighten enough that I could see my swollen wrist and blood still on my hands. I washed it off in the pond, but I couldn’t do anything about the stains on my clothes. I took off my shirt and threw it into the water.
Mom and Dad were still asleep when I snuck into the house and grabbed one of Dad’s dirty T-shirts from the laundry basket. Dad’s wallet lay on the counter, and I took the twenty-six dollars and the keys to the old truck. I didn’t leave a note. I had nothing to say. They never reported the truck missing and they never came looking for me. And I can’t say that I blame them. I wouldn’t have either. Those cracks that I had been hammering into my life and into my marriage had become an earthquake of my own making, one too destructive for me to repair. There was nothing left to do but leave.
