Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“ ‘Of me,’ she said. ‘The devil is trying to make me do things.’ I could hear that she was crying, but the next day she seemed fine, not just fine, better. She was gone when I came back from my first class, and that night she sat at her desk, typing. I assumed she was writing a paper for a class, so even though the clatter of the keys made it difficult to sleep, I said nothing because I was relieved to have her out of bed and back to being a student.

“I woke up to the smell of smoke. Gladys was crouched over the wastebasket, tending a fire inside. I jumped out of bed and tossed a glass of water on it, but it was still smoldering, so I picked the wastebasket up and hurried down the hall to the bathroom, holding it out in front of me. I set it inside a shower and let the water spray on it. The remnants of the paper she’d been typing were inside, charred and soggy, and I emptied everything into the garbage bin in the bathroom and covered it with wet paper towels.

“ ‘What were you doing?’ I said when I returned. ‘Are you crazy?’

“She was back in bed, inside her tent, and when she didn’t answer, I went over and pulled back the covers. A smell rose up, the sour stink of unwashed bed linens. She looked up at me. There were dark circles beneath her eyes, as though she hadn’t slept in days, and her hair had been singed. ‘It wasn’t me,’ she whispered. I could see that she believed it, believed that she’d had no more to do with the fire than I had. I took the blanket from my bed and went to the study room, where I slept on the floor, poorly. In the morning when I returned to our room, Gladys was curled up asleep with the toaster in her arms like a baby. I tiptoed around, foolishly imagining that all she needed was a good sleep, but when I opened my drawer to take out a pair of underwear, I saw that the crotch — indeed, the crotch of every pair — was smeared with currant jam.

“After class I went to the housing office to fill out paperwork for a room transfer. I had to state my reasons, so I wrote down something about differences in religion and schedules because I didn’t want to tell them about the tent or the toaster or the fire or, most of all, the jam in my underwear. When I arrived back at our room, Gladys’s four Bible study friends were in the doorway, holding hands and praying. Inside, Gladys stood in front of the mirror, clutching a pair of scissors, which she’d used to chop her hair down to the scalp. I went in and took the scissors away from her, swept up the hair. ‘Time for you to leave,’ I told the girls, who were watching but doing nothing to help their friend.

“ ‘She asked us to come,’ said Beth, who was quieter than the other three and had, for this reason, struck me as more reasonable. ‘She needs our help.’

“ ‘How’re you going to help her when you’re too afraid to even come in the room?’ I said.

“ ‘We don’t need to come in to pray,’ said Beth, and I saw then that I had been wrong about her, that she was quiet because she was in charge. ‘We’re going to do an exorcism. We were just waiting for you.’

“I knew vaguely what an exorcism was, though not the specifics of what it entailed. ‘I don’t think I’d be much help,’ I said.

“ ‘Gladys said to wait for you,’ Beth said. The four of them looked at one another but not at me or at Gladys, who sat on her bed, shorn, flipping through her Bible and acting as though we had nothing to do with her.

“ ‘She said we needed you because there was no other way to know when the devil was out of her,’ said one of the other girls finally.

“From her bed near the window, Gladys began reading from her Bible: ‘So the devils sought him, saying, If you cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine.’

“ ‘We’re praying for the devil to leave her,’ said Beth.

“ ‘And how will you know when such a thing has occurred?’ I asked.

“ ‘When pigs jump,’ explained Gladys calmly, ‘it’s because they’re trying to snatch the devil out of the air.’

“ ‘So we’re praying for pigs to jump,’ Beth added.

“ ‘Well, I’ve got a test tomorrow,’ I said, ‘so I’ll just leave you to it.’

“I picked up my book bag, but as I walked down the hallway, away from Gladys Moore, who believed the devil was inside her, I heard her call out, ‘Is she jumping?’ and I felt something inside me move. I leaped upward, nipping the air, and from our room, I heard Gladys Moore say, with clear relief, ‘He’s gone.’ ”

* * *

Until he came to live with the Hagedorns, Aaron knew Rudy only through the stories narrated by the men at the café, where Rudy Hagedorn had been a frequent topic of discussion and amusement. He knew that Rudy spent his winters on the lake, drinking himself into a stupor inside his fish house. When Mrs. Hagedorn had not seen him in a few days, she phoned the café and a party of men was sent out to check on him. Once, he had been found asleep beside a Monopoly board, only one game piece, the shoe, wending its way around the track. Another time, he was passed out over his fishing hole, naked but for a pair of wool socks. After they had determined that he was still breathing, alive and eligible for teasing, the men wanted nothing more than to get back to the café, where they could have a cup of hot coffee and deadpan that they had found Rudy with his head stuck in his own hole — his fishing hole, they would clarify, timing it for humorous effect. With this to look forward to, they hurried him back into his clothes and pulled up his line, only to discover a walleye on the hook, spent from hours of trying to free itself. It was bigger than anything any of them had pulled out of the lake that winter, they said in telling the story later, their voices somber as they recalled how they had all stared at the fish, shaking their heads.

When Aaron first moved in, he rarely saw Rudy, who often did not come home after work, the first part of his day bleeding into the second, particularly when his final plumbing call involved a relieved homeowner expressing gratitude with a bottle. Other times, he came home briefly to put something in his stomach before going back out. While he sat in his recliner eating, a bottle of beer poking up from between his legs, he engaged Aaron in conversation, choosing unexpected topics, though Aaron was quick to hide his surprise. One night, for example, as Aaron sat reading My Ántonia, Rudy said that he preferred Song of the Lark, which Aaron had not read, though he was making his way through all of Cather’s work.

“I’ll read it next,” Aaron said. “Did you read Death Comes for the Archbishop ?”

Rudy sighed. “I tried, but I didn’t care for it much.”

“Me neither,” said Aaron, the first time he had admitted this to anyone because his teacher had told him that many people considered it Cather’s masterpiece.

He had never seen Rudy with a book, but that spring when Rudy started taking him fishing, Aaron discovered that he carried one in his glove compartment and another in his tackle box, that he sat each night in his gently rocking boat reading until the light was nearly gone and just enough remained for him to steer to shore by. Rudy taught him how to drive his truck and manage the boat and determine how much line to let down. Aaron looked forward to these evenings, and though Rudy did not talk a lot, he thought that maybe Rudy liked having him around too.

One night, as they sat in the boat staring down at where their lines disappeared into the water, Rudy said, “It was the goddamn desks, you know. They always came around her too snug.” They had not been talking about Bernice before this. They had not been talking at all. Aaron pulled up their lines and turned the boat around, rowing the whole way back instead of using the motor while Rudy sat quietly in the bow. Rudy stored his boat at Last Resort in exchange for handling their plumbing needs, but when they pulled to shore that night he was not sober enough to help Aaron get the boat out of the water. After Aaron had struggled several minutes on his own, a voice came from the dock, asking whether they needed help.