name is Sledge, Reuben Sledge. Are you Miss Van Hooser?”
“Yes.”
“Is Jennie here?”
“What do you want with her?”
“I just want to talk to her. Clear some things up.” A tall slim woman came up beside Alice. “This is Jennie,” she said.
“Jennie, my name is Reuben Sledge. I suppose you were too young to remember your father.” She looked at me through the screen door.
“What do you want, Mr. Sledge?” asked Alice.
“Well . . . do you remember your father or mother?”
“No,” she said, still looking at me like a magazine salesman. I stood looking back at her and mumbled something about thank-you and I was your father’s brother and your mother’s mother lived not too far from me and left. I thought I heard Alice say something then as I walked away but I couldn’t be sure what it was.
The Des Moines City Council learned of the execution of John Charles and acted immediately. Orders were sent out by the director of these affairs and Father learned that his son had been denied burial rites and sacred ground anywhere in Polk County and that similar action was being taken in the surrounding counties for fear that he would attempt to transport his son across the county line. So he went to the farmers and asked for a couple of yards of secluded land; but was unable to obtain anything because they felt that it would be illegal.
“Andrea,” Father said.
Mother looked up from her bed and stared at him. “No,” she said, “they wouldn’t . . . anywhere else and they couldn’t.”
“They have,” said Luke. “There is nothing left. I’ll go tomorrow to the junkyard and . . .”
“No,” said Andrea, “no . . . no . . . no. Burn him in the furnace — throw him in the river — bury him in the yard.”
“But he’s our son. Do you want him laying out in the yard for the rest of our lives?”
“Not our son. He was my son. I grew him in me — where were you then? — at the depot. I fed him and where were you? I told him to leave, from the time he was old enough to hear I begged him to leave — to go away and never come back. I begged him to leave the girl behind, to take nothing with him — nothing that could bring him back — and where were you? And he’s come home, to me, to kill me with his deadness, scream at me from his tomb in the basement — the horror, the mockery. There is a curse on my body.”
“No,” said Luke. “The people have done this.”
“A curse. Look at my hands, my face. I’m dying. I’m dying from something that was small when I was born and like ink has smeared through me. Look at my legs.” And she threw back the covers, revealing her thin legs, lined with varicose veins. “Those are veins, black veins bulging with poison, tearing themselves out of my body.”
Nellie had come to the door and stood holding me against her, and looked at Mother sitting on the bed rocking back and forth, her hands rubbing up and back, down her legs. Nellie carried me to the bed and held me out for Mother to take. She took me in her arms, clutched me hard against her breasts, and then turning her head aside thrust me away. Nellie gathered me from her and left the room. Luke caught the edge of the covers in his hands and raised them to cover Andrea. “Don’t touch me,” she screamed and grabbed at the blankets herself, pulling them around her and from under the mattress.
Father went to an auto salvage yard and bought a car, a Ford as Nellie tells it, and pulled it home with a chain. Walt and Father brought John Charles out of the basement and put him into the back seat. They carried Mother’s body, wrapped in a sheet (because even though Father did not believe her talk of curses and poison he might not have been so sure and didn’t want Paul to touch her), from her bed and laid her across the front seat. They pulled the car down Clinton and at First Avenue unloosed the chain. They pushed the Ford by hand around the corner and sent it off down into the fog. They stood on the rim and listened to the tires against the road. Below they heard the monument closing, like a huge boulder dropping several feet into a grass-lined pocket of earth — the perfect seal.... No other sound came up from the fog and they went home.
Chapter III
EACH MORNING ON HIS WAY TO THE DEPOT LUKE SLEDGE bought one pint of whiskey. On Saturday he bought two. He drank half a bottle in the morning and half in the afternoon and threw the empty into a trash barrel in the parking lot that was our front yard. He was not a drunk and I never saw my father without control of himself. However, he was mildly intoxicated constantly, and so appeared to have no vices . . . the cells of his body gulped whiskey like a tree drinking water out of the ground, pulling it up into its roots and sending it out into the farthest, highest leaves. Even the smell soaked into his brain and disappeared. Few people ever knew that he drank. There was only one way to know — the eyes. Father had told me that. “Look,” he’d say. “Look at the eyes,” and he’d point to his eyes. “There, Reuben, a thin layer of film, like glass — and that’s the difference. Without it you can’t see right.” But I wasn’t sure about that. “A dust storm, for example,” he said. “Who can see a dust storm better, a man standing inside it or a man standing behind a window?”
Father had learned somewhere how to engrave. He sat behind his desk in the depot with his burins and copper plates and carved intricate designs — lines and curves that intersected and went parallel, tangents, parabolas, hyperbolas, squares, three-dimensional cones and hexagons. Paul once found an engraving of a dollar bill in a drawer cluttered with dirty paper and rusty bolts. The detail was perfect. But Father never printed any of his engravings. “The ink spoils it,” he said. “The colors are never right and always smear and make the lines fuzzy. It’s best to throw the plate away after you make it. As soon as you print it it becomes something not like it was. And the lines in the plate get ruined.” One summer Father attempted to teach me how to engrave, but I kept wanting to touch the plate with my fingers to feel the lines because it was difficult to see them at all unless you tipped the plate at just the right angle from the light. But Father was critical of this. “That leaves fingerprints and makes for a messy job,” he would say, and finally gave up teaching me altogether after he apprehended me introducing different colored inks into our engraving studio.
Paul quit high school in his junior year and taught himself to become an auto mechanic. After a couple of years he had our front yard littered with the engines, frames, seats, and bumpers of dead automobiles that he meticulously resurrected and transplanted into living automobiles. At first, the people’s resentment still being what it was after John Charles’s death, he was unable to get work. But slowly, a few at a time — those who couldn’t get a distributor or a transmission fixed anywhere else except by specialists in Chicago — they began to come, pulling their injured cars up in front of the house for Paul to fix. Father once told him that if he would start a garage away from home, business would be better. But Paul wouldn’t do that. “If they want their cars fixed they have to come here . . . this is where I live,” he said. And they did come, but only when there was no other choice, and then only apologetically. “I’ve got some trouble here with my car,” they’d say, “I wouldn’t come but Mac’s Garage don’t do work on fluid drives, and I need the car to get to the plant and back.” Many of them wouldn’t come to the door but sat in their automobiles in the front yard and honked until Paul came outside. “Those son-of-a-bitches,” Walt would scream, “I’ll go out there and shove their fuckin’ heads down those horns.” But Paul would get up and say that it was O.K. — that they only did that because they couldn’t do nothing else. The money Paul made fixing cars he put in a cupboard in the kitchen and whenever anyone needed some money that’s where he got it.
Will was like