Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

I heard the breath expelled, the woodcrack, the intake of his breath, and then the words. He said, low, “ You can’t go down there! Who ever said you could go down there? It isn’t allowed, and you know it very well. Yards of bother in that, silly boy. You stay up here with me, won’t you?” Then he swung, and the wood split, and he stood another piece on the block. “Of course,” he said, and in a different, deeper, voice, “this isn’t the kind of report we like to get. We don’t blame you, understand. No one’s blaming you. All we care about is if you’re happy and well. Would you call yourself happy and well? Can you think of anything Mommy and I can do to make you happy and well? By God, we would do it, Kev. We’d do anything. You know that.” He swung, but the head was canted a little and the ax skipped. He was positioned right, and he was safe. “Look the head right into the wood,” he instructed himself. The voice was familiar. Of course. It was mine. He split the piece, took a breath, set up another and, looking at it and saying, “All I love is you,” as if Deborah were speaking to her son in our yard, he swung the ax. All he had to do now, I thought, was imitate Jillie divorcing me, and he’d have invoked us all.

Before he could tense for another swing, I said, “Kevin. Hot dogs for lunch.”

He turned to watch me walk over from the car. “How come I didn’t hear you come here, Uncle Bob?”

“I guess I drove very quietly.”

He laughed a little too loudly, watching me with his baby’s brown eyes. He was very alert. I wondered what had made him that wary. “I was chopping wood,” he said. “In case we need it for the fireplace.”

“You did a good job, Kevin. Do you remember how to leave the ax?”

He turned and swung, very hard, and buried the blade in the block.

“Good man,” I said with gratitude.

Jillie had been watching us from the kitchen, I thought, because she was at the door before I touched the knob. “Home for lunch, how nice,” she said, as if I hadn’t driven too quickly. “Kevin’s been splitting kindling, and I’ve been trying to think of something special to eat.” I handed her the paper sack, and she said, “My favorite! Hot dogs! My white knight of the sausage casing.”

Kevin said, “Yay!”

“Boiled, I think. I have a package of sauerkraut and some yellow mustard and — yes, we’ll grill the rolls. It’ll be an all Brooklyn hot dog day. Like eating at Nathan’s. Kevin — did you ever get to Nathan’s at Coney Island?”

He was studying her bottom in her jeans. “No, Aunt Gillian,” he told her buttocks.

She said, “We’ll go there one day. With Mommy. Kevin? Your mom’s coming here.”

“Here? How?”

“The same way you did.”

“Airplane,” he said. “It was a terrible trip. It took for ever . They gave me an extra dinner, did I tell you that? When?”

“Jillie,” I said, after a while, “Kevin wants to know when she’s coming.”

“Deborah is coming,” Jillie said while looking at me, her brows up and her cheeks pale, “tomorrow. She’s going to rent a car and drive up from New York.”

“That’s an ugly drive if you’re jet-lagged.”

“No,” Jillie said, “she’ll take a couple of Valium when she gets on and she’ll sleep through. She always does. She’ll be fresh for the trip. Will you be glad to see her, Kevin?”

“Yup.”

“Will you be glad to see her, Bob?”

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Is Arthur coming?”

Jillie shrugged.

“You called her?”

Jillie, at the stove, nodded.

“How was it? The conversation?”

“Pas devant l’enfant.” She added, “ Merde ,” probably because she was pleased with her rediscovered French.

I decided not to be warned off. I really needed to know . “I mean, after what? A real while, huh? You guys just clicked right into place and it was like no time lost? Nothing uneasy?”

Jillie said, with conviction, “ Cochon .” You can be cute when you call a man a swine, or you can mean it — the snout, the hairy tail, the four hard hooves.

I decided not to say, in French, Why, what a clever notion you had, making things safe by suggesting he play with the ax. I imagine the idea was to get him outside, away from you. But think how handy it would have been if he’d decided to get back in in a hurry. I did say, “I think maybe you want to let us wash your clothes for you, Kevin. I’ll give you something of mine, and you let us—”

“That means Aunt Gillian,” Jillie said. “Uncle Bob, with his jurisprudence degree and the summa cum laude from Cornell never quite got hold of the mystery of the washing machine dial.”

“ Quel canard,” I said. “Jillie, what was Deborah’s news? What’s up?” What’s up?”

I went to the stoveside counter and took the platter of hot dogs and the basket of rolls. Jillie brought mustard and sauerkraut and glasses of pop on a tray. Kevin seemed to have shrunk in his chair.

Jillie studied him. She said, “Mommy isn’t coming because she’s angry, Kevin. She’s coming because she misses you.”

He shook his head, and there seemed to be less play to his expression, less life in the muscles of his forehead and jaw. I said, “Hey, Kevin. You take your medicine every day, right?”

“Every day,” he said.

“Did you take it this day?”

He looked at me and looked at me, and his eyes showed energy for an instant, and he shook his head. “I forgot,” he said.

“Let’s do it now, Kevin. You go find your medicine, your pills.”

“Once in the morning and once with my tea.”

“First, you can eat some hot dogs and then you can wash. And I will set the left-hand dial at medium, and the right at warm water wash and cold rinse. We’ll have you clean as a whistle.”

Kevin stuck a finger in each side of his mouth and, from stretched, unnatural-looking lips, he whistled so loudly you’d have thought someone was screaming.

We ate in a silence that wasn’t peaceful. I smiled at Jillie and tried to help Kevin tend the sauerkraut that radiated from his plate in a ragged circle on his place mat and the dark wood of the table. I thought of Tasha, and I thought of Deborah. I watched Jillie’s shoulders bow down, as she sat, beneath whatever she felt I had known her for so many years, and I could not have named her feelings. But I felt them gathering. I watched the lines at the sides of her eyes, the shifting muscles of her forearms, the skin of her cheeks, and the flesh at her hairline. Everything moved subtly, in ways I might have claimed once to know, but which now seemed new to me. Birds cackled near the kitchen window, and our mouths made soft noises around our food. It was gathering.

Kevin used the downstairs tub — we could hear him splash like a kid — and I loaded his clothing in the washing machine in the pantry off the kitchen while Jillie cleaned our lunch dishes. It didn’t come with violence — an ax, say, wielded by the damaged son, Deborah’s hope gone imperfect. It didn’t come by surprise. It was the message from my life, and that should always be expected. Later in the day, later that night, alone, I told myself I’d been waiting for it for years.

Jillie came to the pantry with an obvious reluctance. But she couldn’t, I saw, have stayed away. She came close to me. I could smell the bright scent of the dishwashing soap and the rich darkness of her perfume on her skin. She reached for my arm, which was poised with detergent above the machine, and she touched the back of my hand. She put her fingers gently around my wrist. She couldn’t make her fingers meet although I felt the pressure of her effort. Then she let me go. She took a deep breath. It reminded me of Kevin’s breathing outside at the woodpile. I thought of myself in Marlow, years before, panting like a runner.