Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

Two nights later, Saul finished diapering Mary Esther and then walked into the upstairs hallway toward the bathroom. He brushed against Patsy, who was heading downstairs. Under the ceiling lights her eyes were shadowed with fatigue. They did not speak, and for ten seconds she was a stranger to him. He could not remember why he had ever married her, and he could not remember having desire for her. She was a young, wearied mother, and she looked temporarily used up. For half a minute, he breathed in the pure air of despondency. After shaking for a moment, he tried to regain his balance in the hallway in front of the open bathroom door, angry and frightened, feeling his wounds opening but bleeding inward rather than outward.

When Saul entered his classroom the next day, Gordy and Bob greeted his arrival with rattled throat noises, sociopathic gargling. On their foreheads they had written MAD IN THE USA, in pencil. “Mad,” or “made” misspelled? Saul didn’t ask. Seated in their broken desks and only vaguely attentive, the other students fidgeted and smiled politely, picking at their frayed clothes uniformly one or two sizes too small.

“Today,” Saul said, “we’re going to pretend that we’re young again. I don’t mean a year or two younger, I mean much younger. We’re going to think about what babies would say if they could talk.”

He reached into his jacket pocket for his seven duplicate photographs of Mary Esther, in which she leaned against the back of the sofa, her stuffed gnome in her lap.

“This is my daughter,” Saul said, passing the photographs out. “Mary Esther.” The four girls in the classroom made peculiar cooing sounds. The boys reacted with squirming nervous laughter, except for Gordy and Bob, who had suddenly turned to stone. “Babies want to say things, right? Except they can’t, not yet. What would she say if she could talk? Write it out on a sheet of paper. Give her some words.”

Saul knew he was testing the Cossacks. He was screwing up their heads with parental love that they themselves had never sampled. For Gordy Himmelman, the idea of an actual father would be the mystery beyond all mysteries. It would make him crazy, and that might be interesting. At the back of the room, Gordy, in all his bewilderment, studied the photograph. His face expressed the staring-nothing with which he was on intimate terms. All his feelings were bricked up; and nothing escaped from him.

His was the zombie point of view.

Nevertheless, he bent down over his desk, pencil in hand.

At the end of the hour, Saul collected the papers, and his students shuffled out into the hallway. Saul had noticed that poor readers did not lift their feet off the floor. You could hear them coming down the hallway from the slide and scrape and squeal of their shoes.

He searched for Gordy Himmelman’s paper. Here it was, mad in America, several lines of scrawled writing.

They thro me up in to the air. Peopl come in when I screem and thro me up in to the air. They stik my face up. They never cacht me.

The next lines were heavily erased.

her + try it out. You ink

Saul held up the paper to read the illegible words, and he saw the word “kick” again, next to the word “lidel.”

His head randomly swimming, Saul held the photographs of his daughter, the little kike thoughtfully misspelled by Gordon Himmelman, before bringing the photos to his chest absentmindedly. From the hallway he heard the sound of lively braying laughter.

That night, Saul, fortified with Mad Dog’s no-brand beer, read the want ads, deeply interested. The want ads were full of trash and leavings, employment opportunities (most of them at Five Oaks’s largest employer, WaldChem, where every job was lethal), and the promise of new lives amid the advertised wreckage of the old. He read the personals like a scholar, checking for verbal nuance. Sitting in his overstuffed chair, he had been scanning the columns when his eye stopped on a singular item.

BEEHIVES FOR SALE — MUST SELL. SHELLS, FRAMES, EXTRACTOR. ALSO INCL. SMOKER AND PROTECTIVE HAT TOOLS AND FACE COVERING. GOOD CONDITION. ANY OFFER CONSIDERED. EAGER TO DEAL. $$$ POTENTIAL. CALL AFTER 7PM. 890-7236.

Saul took Mary Esther out of her pendulum chair and held her as he walked around the house, thick with plans and vision. In the vision, he stood proudly in front of Patsy, holding a jar of honey. Sunlight slithered through its glass and transformed the room itself into pure gold. Sweetness was everywhere. Honey would make all the desires right again between them. The peaceable kingdom would return, and the arrows would fly backward away from their targets and find themselves on the string of the bow as the bow itself was unstrung and put away into its case. Gordy Himmelman, meanwhile, would have erased himself from the planet. He would have caused himself in a feat of Flash Gordon — like magic to dematerialize. In this dream, whose colors resembled those of the porn film, Patsy accepted Saul’s gift. She couldn’t stop smiling at him. She tore off her clothes, his too. She poured the honey over Saul.

It was one of his better daydreams. Gazing at the newspapers and magazines piling up next to the TV set and VCR, as he held and burped Mary Esther, Saul found himself shaking with a kind of excitement. Irony, his constant lifelong faithful sidekick, was asleep, or on vacation, and in its heady absence Saul began to reimagine himself as a money-maker, a beekeeper, a man Patsy could not stop herself from loving. Rescue me, he thought, not sure if the words were his or Patsy’s or just came from that great old song.

He did not accuse Gordy of anti-Semitism, or of anything else. He ignored him, as he ignored Bob Pawlak. At the end of the school year they would all go away and drain down into the earth and the dirt and swill they came from and become one with the stones and the all-embracing sewage. A new principle: Some things you can’t help; some things you can’t save, and you’re better off not trying.

On a fine warm day in April, Saul drove out to the north side of town, where he bought the wooden frames and the other equipment from a laconic man named Gunderson. Gunderson wore overalls and boots. Using the flat of his hand, he rubbed the top of his bald head with a farmer’s gesture of suspicion as he examined Saul’s white shirt, pressed pants, funky two-day growth of beard, and brown leather shoes. “Don’t wear black clothes around these fellas,” Gunderson said, meaning the bees. “Bees hate black. Just hate it. Don’t know why, but they do.” Saul paid him in cash, and Gunderson counted the money after Saul handed it over, wetting his thumb to turn the bills.

With Mad Dog’s pickup, Saul brought it all back to Whitefeather Road. He stored his purchases behind the garage. He took out books on beekeeping from the public library and studied their instructions with care. He made notes on a yellow tablet and calculated hive placement. The bees needed direct sunlight, and water nearby. By phone he bought a colony of bees complete with a queen from an apiary in South Carolina, using his credit card number. He did not think he was being hysterical, though the possibility had occurred to him.

When the bee box arrived at the main post office, he received an angry call from the assistant postal manager telling him to come down and pick up this damn humming thing.

As it turned out, the bees liked Saul. They were more predictable than his students, and they worked harder. He was calm and slow around them and talked to them when he removed them from the shipping box and introduced them into the shells and frames, following the instructions he had learned by heart. The hives and frames sat unsteadily on the platform he had laid down on bricks near two fence posts on the edge of the property. But the structure was, he thought, steady enough for bees. He gorged them on sugar syrup, sprinkling it over them before letting them free, shaking them into the frames. Some of them settled on his gloved hands and were so drowsy that, when he pushed them off, they waterfalled into the hive. When the queen and the other bees were enclosed, he replaced the frames inside the shell, being careful to put a feeder with sugar water nearby, outside the shell.