Buried Child (11 page)

DODGE:
Gimme a drink and I'll tell ya.

DEWIS:
Halie, maybe this isn't the right time for a visit,
(HALIE
crosses back to
DEWIS.)

HALIE:
(
To
DEWIS.)
I never should've left! I never, never should've left! Tilden could be anywhere now! Anywhere! He's not in control of his faculties. He wanders. You know how he wanders. Dodge knew that. I told him when I left here. I told him specifically to watch out for Tilden,
(BRADLEY
reaches down, grabs
DODGE
's
blanket, and yanks it off him. He lays down on the sofa and pulls the blanket over his head.)

DODGE:
He's got my blanket again! He's got my blanket!

HALIE:
(Turning to
BRADLEY.)
Bradley! Bradley, put that blanket back!
(HALIE
moves toward
BRADLEY. SHELLY
suddenly throws the cup and saucer against the right door,
DEWIS
ducks. The cup and saucer smash into pieces,
HALIE
stops, turns toward
SHELLY.
Everyone freezes,
BRADLEY
slowly pulls his head out from under the blanket, looks toward right door, then to
SHELLY, SHELLY
stares at
HALIE. DEWIS
cowers with the roses,
SHELLY
moves slowly toward
HALIE.
Long pause,
SHELLY
speaks softly)

SHELLY:
(
To
HALIE.)
I am here! I am standing right here in front of you. I am breathing. I am speaking. I am alive! I exist.
DO YOU SEE ME?

BRADLEY:
(Sitting up on the sofa.)
We don't have to tell you anything, girl. Not a thing. You're not the police are you? You're not the government. You're just some prostitute that Tilden brought in here.

HALIE:
Language! I won't have that language in my house! Father, I'm—

SHELLY:
(To
BRADLEY.)
You stuck your hand in my mouth and you call me a prostitute! What kind of a weird fucked-up yo-yo are you?

HALIE:
Bradley! Did you put your hand in this girl's mouth? You have no idea what kind of diseases she might be carrying.

BRADLEY:
I never did. She's lying. She's lying through her teeth.

DEWIS:
Halie, I think I'll be running along now. I'll just put the roses in the kitchen. Keep them fresh. A little sugar sometimes helps,
(DEWIS
moves toward left,
HALIE
stops him.)

HALIE:
Don't go now, Father! Not now. Please—I'm not sure I can stay afloat.

BRADLEY:
I never did anything, Mom! I never touched her! She propositioned me! And I turned her down. I turned her down flat! She's not my type. You know that, Mom.
(SHELLY
suddenly grabs her coat off the wooden leg and takes both the leg and coat downstage, away from
BRADLEY.)
Mom!

Mom! She's got my leg! She's taken my leg! I never did anything to her! She's stolen my leg! She's a devil, Mom. How did she get in our house?
(BRADLEY
reaches pathetically in the air for his leg.
SHELLY
sets it down for a second, puts on her coat fast, and picks up the leg again,
DODGE
starts coughing again softly.)

HALIE:
(
To
SHELLY.)
I think we've had about enough of you, young lady. Just about enough. I don't know where you came from or what you're doing here but you're no longer welcome in this house.

SHELLY:
(Laughs, holds the leg.)
No longer welcome!

BRADLEY:
Mom! That's my leg! Get my leg back! I can't do anything without my leg! She's trying to torture me.
(BRADLEY
keeps on making whimpering sounds and reaching for his leg.)

HALIE:
Give my son back his leg. Right this very minute! Dodge, where did this girl come from?
(DODGE
starts laughing softly to himself in between coughs.)

DODGE:
She's a pistol, isn't she?

HALIE:
(
To
DEWIS.)
Father, do something about this, would you! I'm not about to be terrorized in my own house!

DEWIS:
This is out of my domain.

BRADLEY:
Gimme back my leg!

HALIE:
Oh, shut up, Bradley! Just shut up! You don't need your leg now! Just lay down and shut up! I've never heard such whining,
(BRADLEY
whimpers, lies down, and pulls the blanket around him. He keeps one arm outside the blanket, reaching out toward his wooden leg.
DEWIS
cautiously approaches
SHELLY
with the roses in his arms,
SHELLY
clutches the wooden leg to her chest as though she's kidnapped it.)

DEWIS:
(
To
SHELLY.)
Now, honestly, dear, wouldn't it be better to talk things out? To try to use some reason? No point in going off the deep end. Nothing to be gained in that.

SHELLY:
There isn't any reason here! I can't find a reason for anything.

DEWIS:
There's nothing to be afraid of. These are all good people. All righteous souls.

SHELLY:
I'm not afraid!

DEWIS:
But this is not your house. You have to have some respect.

SHELLY:
You're the strangers here, not me.

HALIE:
This has gone on far enough!

DEWIS:
Halie, please. Let me handle this. I've had some experience.

SHELLY:
Don't come near me! Don't anyone come near me. I don't need any words from you. I'm not threatening
anybody. I don't even know what I'm doing here. You all say you don't remember Vince, okay maybe you don't. Maybe it's Vince that's crazy. Maybe he's made this whole family thing up. I don't even care anymore. I was just coming along for the ride. I thought it'd be a nice gesture. Besides, I was curious. He made all of you sound familiar to me. Every one of you. For every name, I had an image. Every time he'd tell me a name, I'd see the person. In fact, each of you was so clear in my mind that I actually believed it was you. I really believed that when I walked through that door that the people who lived here would turn out to be the same people in my imagination. Real people. People with faces. But I don't recognize any of you. Not one. Not even the slightest resemblance.

DEWIS:
Well, you can hardly blame others for not fulfilling your hallucination.

SHELLY:
It was no hallucination! It was more like a prophecy. You believe in prophecy, don't you, Father?

HALIE:
Father, there's no point in talking to her any further. We're just going to have to call the police.

BRADLEY:
No! Don't get the police in here. We don't want the police in here. This is our home.

SHELLY:
That's right. Bradley's right. Don't you usually settle your affairs in private? Don't you usually take them out in the dark? Out in the back?

BRADLEY:
You stay out of our lives! You have no business interfering!

SHELLY:
I don't have any business, period. I got nothing to lose. I'm a free agent.
(She moves around, staring at each of them.)

BRADLEY:
You don't know what we've been through. You don't know anything about us!

SHELLY:
I know you've got a secret. You've all got a secret. It's so secret, in fact, you're all convinced it never happened.
(HALIE
moves to
DEWIS.)

HALIE:
Oh, my God, Father! Who is this person?

DODGE:
(Laughing to himself.)
She thinks she's going to get it out of us. She thinks she's going to uncover the truth of the matter. Like a detective or something.

BRADLEY:
I'm not telling her anything! Nothing's wrong here! Nothing's ever been wrong! Everything's the way it's supposed to be! Nothing ever happened that's bad. Everything is all right here! We're all good people! We've always been good people. Right from the very start.

DODGE:
She thinks she's gonna suddenly bring everything out into the open after all these years.

DEWIS:
(To
SHELLY.)
Can't you see that these people want to be left in peace? Don't you have any mercy? They haven't done anything to you.

DODGE:
She wants to get to the bottom of it.
(To
SHELLY.)
That's it, isn't it? You'd like to get right down to bedrock? Look the beast right dead in the eye. You want me to tell ya? You want me to tell ya what happened? I'll tell ya. I might as well. I wouldn't mind hearing it hit the air after all these years of silence.

BRADLEY:
No! Don't listen to him. He doesn't remember anything!

DODGE:
I remember the whole thing from start to finish. I remember the day he was born.
(Pause.)

HALIE:
Dodge, if you tell this thing—if you tell this, you'll be dead to me. You'll be just as good as dead.

DODGE:
That won't be such a big change, Halie. See this girl, this little girl here, she wants to know. She wants to know something more. And I got this feeling that it doesn't make a bit a difference. I'd sooner tell it to a stranger than anybody else. I'd sooner tell it to the four winds.

BRADLEY:
(To
DODGE.)
We made a pact! We made a pact between us! You can't break that now!

DODGE:
I don't remember any pact.
(Silence.)
See, we were a well-established family once. Well-established. All the boys were grown. The farm was producing enough milk to fill Lake Michigan twice over. Me and Halie here were pointed toward what looked like the middle part of our life. Everything was settled with us. All we had to do was
ride it out. Then Halie got pregnant again. Out the middle a nowhere, she got pregnant. We weren't planning on havin’ any more boys. We had enough boys already. In fact, we hadn't been sleepin’ in the same bed for about six years.

HALIE:
(Moving toward the stairs.)
I'm not listening to this! I don't have to listen to this!

DODGE:
(Stops
HALIE.)
Where are you going?! Upstairs?! You'll just be listenin’ to it upstairs! You go outside, you'll be lis-tenin’ to it outside. Might as well stay here and listen to it.
(HALIE
stays by the stairs. Pause.)
Halie had this kid, see. This baby boy. She had it. I let her have it on her own. All the other boys I had had the best doctors, the best nurses, everything. This one I let her have by herself. This one hurt real bad. Almost killed her, but she had it anyway. It lived, see. It lived. It wanted to grow up in this family. It wanted to be just like us. It wanted to be part of us. It wanted to pretend that I was its father. She wanted me to believe in it. Even when everyone around us knew. Everyone. All our boys knew. Tilden knew.

HALIE
: You shut up! Bradley, make him stop!

BRADLEY:
I can't.

DODGE:
Tilden was the one who knew. Better than any of us. He'd walk for miles with that kid in his arms. Halie let him take it. All night sometimes. He'd walk all night out there in the pasture with it. Talkin’ to it. Singin’ to it. Used to hear him singing to it. He'd make up stories. He'd
tell that kid all kinds a stories. Even when he knew it couldn't understand him. We couldn't let a thing like that continue. We couldn't allow that to grow up right in the middle of our lives. It made everything we'd accomplished look like it was nothin’. Everything was canceled out by this one mistake. This one weakness.

SHELLY
: So you …

DODGE:
I killed it. I drowned it. Just like the runt of a litter. Just drowned it. There was no struggle. No noise. Life just left it.
(HALIE
moves toward
BRADLEY.)

HALIE:
(To
BRADLEY)
Ansel would've stopped him! Ansel would've stopped him from telling these lies! He was a hero! A man! A whole man! What's happened to the men in this family?! Where are the men?!
(Suddenly
VINCE
comes crashing through the screen porch door up left, tearing it off its hinges. Everyone but
DODGE
and
BRADLEY
back away from the porch and stare at
VINCE,
who has landed on his stomach on the porch in a drunken stupor. He is singing loudly to himself and hauls himself slowly to his feet. He has a paper shopping bag full of empty booze bottles. He takes them out one at a time as he sings and smashes them at the opposite end of the porch, behind the solid interior door, right,
SHELLY
moves slowly toward right, holding the wooden leg and watching
VINCE.)

VINCE:
(Singing loudly as he hurls bottles.)
“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. We will fight our country's battles in the air on land and sea.”
(He punctuates the words “Montezuma,” “Tripoli,” “battles,” and “sea” with
a smashed bottle each. He stops throwing for a second, stares toward right of the porch, shades his eyes with his hand as though looking across to a battlefield, then cups his hands around his mouth and yells across the space of the porch to an imaginary army. The others watch in terror and expectation. To the imagined army.)
Have you had enough over there?! ‘Cause there's a lot more here where that came from!
(Pointing to the paper bag full of bottles.)
A helluva lot more! We got enough over here to blow ya from here to Kingdom come!
(He takes another bottle, makes the high whistling sound of a bomb, and throws it toward right porch. Sound of a bottle smashing against a wall. This should be the actual smashing of a bottle and not taped sound. He keeps yelling and heaving bottles one after another.
VINCE
stops for a while, breathing heavily from exhaustion. Long silence as the others watch him.
SHELLY
approaches tentatively in
VINCEí
direction, still holding
BRADLEY
’s wooden leg.)