William Gass - In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

3

Mrs. Mean seizes Ames’s arm, twists it behind him, rains blows upon his head and neck. He pulls away and runs. It’s to her purpose. She permits his flight. Now the words come and I understand that the silence has been a dam. Her arm points accusingly at his eyeless back. She curses him. She pronounces judgment upon him. She cannot understand his laziness, his uselessness, his disobedience, his stupidity, his slovenliness, his dirtiness, his ugliness; and Mrs. Mean launches into her list, not only of those faults she finds in his present conduct, but all she can remember having found since he first dangled from the doctor’s fist and was too slow to cry or cried too faintly or was too red or too wizened or too small or was born with eczema on his chest — a terrible mortification to his mother. He has been nothing but a shame since, a shame in all his days and all his doings. The ultimate word is hurled after him as he slams the door: Shame! He is given to understand by shouts directed toward the upstairs windows that there will be more to come, that she is not done with him, the shameful, disrespectful boy, the shameful, discourteous child; and now and then, though not this time, if the boy’s spirits are unusually high, if he is filled more than ordinarily with rebellion, he will thrust his head from the window of what I take to be his room, for that is where he has been sent, and make a horrible face at his mother, and a horrible bracking noise; whereupon Mrs. Mean will stop as though struck, suck in her breath, pause dreadfully to scream “What!” at the affront; and then explode derisively, contemptuously, “You! you! you!” until she sputters out. She rounds up the other children if they remain to be rounded up and some minutes later howls of pain and grief can be heard over the whole block.

It is on these occasions, I think, that the children are really hurt. The cuffs, the slaps, the switches they receive are painful, doubtless, but they are brief. They are also, in a sense, routine. The blows remind me of the repertoire of the schoolyard bully: the pinch, the shove, the hair-pull, the sudden blow on the muscle of the arm, the swift kick to the shin, elbow in the groin. Evil that is everyday is lost in life, goes shrewdly into it; becomes a part of habitual blood. First it is a convenient receptacle for blame. It holds all hate. We fasten to it — the permanent and always good excuse. If it were not for it, ah then, we say, we would improve, we would succeed, we would go on. And then one day it is necessary, as if there’s been a pain to breathing for so long that when the pain at last subsides, out of fright, we suffocate. So they grow up in it. At any rate, they get larger. They know the rules by heart for it’s like a game, a game there is no fun in playing and no profit. Ames retreats into the house with Mrs. Mean’s damnations at his back while the others, warned now, ready, circle widely out in alleys and around garages and old carriage barns, between the nearby houses, as Mrs. Mean cautiously seeks them, carefully guarding her rear, swiveling often, doubling back, peering craftily around corners until she finds one and the distance has been closed, when she makes a sudden, silent rush with her switch extended, beating before her the empty air, whipping the heels of the child as it runs for home. I don’t know all the rules or I don’t fully understand them but I gather that when Mr. Mean’s at work the front door is always locked, for the children never try to sneak in that way; and I guess the house must be home base, must be sanctuary except in the gravest cases. If they are not let out again, they are at least not beaten. They don’t have to dance after dandelion seeds in the hot yard.

My wife and I find it strange that they should all run home. It seems perverse, unnaturally sacrificial: the self leading itself, as in a great propelling crowd, blind over cliffs, stupidly to the sea. We’d run away, we affirm in our adulthood to one another, knowing, as we make the affirmation, that even old as we are, adult as we claim to be, we would return to the poisonous nest as they return, children still largely on turned-out feet, the girl unbreasted, the boys inadequate and bare for manhood. We would chew on our hurt and feel the pain again of our beginnings. We would languish for the glory of complaint in the old ties. The eldest Mean child may someday say, confronted by a meanness that’s his own, by his own mean soul, that he was beaten as a boy; and he may take a certain solace from the fact; he may shift at least a portion of his blame to the ages. “This shit’s not mine.” “Mann ist was er isst.” “Alas for the present time!”

We wish they would run off, certainly, as we wanted to run off, for had we run away, had we had the courage we so easily wish for them and the necessary resource, we feel we’d be as much as moral now, clear of the need to disclaim our dirt, round, holding our tail between our teeth. For that, we must exaggerate the past. We inflate it with our wrongs. Fortunately for us then, unfortunately for us now, it was really not so bad. We were not pursued and beaten. We were not beggared in our own yard. We were not flayed within the hearing of the world. Our surprise is symbolic. It is a gesture of speech. It expresses a wish of our own; and if we really felt the indignation and disappointment we put into words when we see the Mean children flying to their hive, my wife and I; if we ever borrowed to apply to them any anger from our feelings for Mrs. Mean, it would be an injustice on our part almost as great as in our power as mere observers to do them; although I am not above injustice and must confess, despite my knowledge of the dreadful circumstances of his life, a dislike of Ames, the eldest Mean child, especially upon his bike, as deep as my dislike for his cow-chested, horse-necked, sow-faced mother. “It may have been put in him, but he is nasty, unnaturally nasty,” I’m afraid I often say. “He can’t help it,” my wife replies, and I glare at the children too, as Mrs. Mean flushes them one by one and they run or toddle to the house, because I know my wife is right. I exclaim at their stupidity, their lack of character, their lack of fight — I have my list as Mrs. Mean has hers — for I am, in these remote engagements, as fearsome, as bold and blustering as a shy and timorous man can be.

But after all there must be corners in that little house for each of them, corners that are personal and familiar where the walls come together like the crook of a soft, warm arm and some hour has been passed in quiet love with a private treasure. There must be some sight, some touch, that is a comfort and can draw them to the trap. We haven’t been suckled, thank god, by Mrs. Mean, or bathed or clothed or put to bed or nursed when we’ve been ill. Perhaps her touch is sometimes tender and her tone is sweet. My wife is hopeful.

Really I am not. Their house is chocolate. The paint is peeling badly. It has a tin roof. The front porch is narrow. The house is narrow. The windows are low and small. The gutters need repair. There are rust stains on the side of the house. There are cracks in the foundation. The chimney tilts. I cannot think of it as sanctuary for very long. I try. I see the children orbiting. They vanish within and I try to think they could, like Quasimodo, cry their safety. But is there any reason for us to suppose that life inside is any better than the life outside we see? My wife wishes to believe it — for the children — but I cannot imagine the deep shadows of that little house full of anything warm except perhaps the rolled, damp fat of Mr. Mean, squatting like a toad in his underwear, his bright, hard eyes pinned like beads to his face, his tongue licking the corners of his mouth, his fingers rubbing softly up and down his other fingers, his legs gliding against themselves, his pale skin bluish in the bad light.