Nights Below Station Street (16 page)

“If I drink now – I’m a real goner.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, in an easy way, “you won’t drink – you’ve gotten it licked!”

That night her brothers wanted to take them out to the new tavern, and busied themselves getting ready, while Joe stood in the kitchen with his hat (a cowboy hat they had brought him) in his hand, with the same worried look on his face. The house smelled of shaving lotion in the early fall air, and there was the scent of cigarettes and beer. The calendar in the kitchen was dated a month behind, and there was a scent of aluminum and tin from outside. The water was grey, and yet huge white clouds with pink bellies floated above. Therefore, the air, the scent of cigarettes and the boys singing, all gave Joe the feeling that it would be good to have a drink – to laugh and talk with a bottle and to forget your troubles.

Joe sat in the tavern with them drinking tomato juice, and Rita found herself discussing old times with her brothers – and all of this, as innocent as it was, was an indication to Joe that he had become an outsider. Then her brothers asked her about her old boyfriend, the one she’d gone with the summer Joe was working in the woods. The brothers did not think that this would be a sensitive subject to Joe. Rita answered bluntly that she had not seen him in years and Joe said nothing. But for the first time because he was not drinking he was not the same.

Her brothers deployed themselves on the couches, and slept on the floors, and every night Joe came home from work and found them already into the booze, and waiting to tell him of some innocent incident that had happened
that day. Every night Joe remained an outsider to the one thing he had in common with other men, a capacity and willingness to drink.

And through all of this Joe saw one thing – which he kept in his heart. He saw that her brothers, whom she pampered and protected, acted with no idea of the consequences, and therefore in them he could only see himself.

So one night at the end of two weeks Joe found himself listening to the same stories coming from different bottles. And without even thinking he was going to drink, and drink being the furthest thing from his mind, he could not stop pouring a bottle of wine into himself.

Then Rita, angry with him over this, shouted at him, and he pushed her away with one hand, and she fell on her rump. As soon as they saw Joe drinking, the brothers became sorry for Rita, and told Joe to settle down. And Joe laughed and picked one up by the belt buckle with his teeth and shook him. Then Adele flew into the fray, and hit him on the head with a broom, shouting: “Let go of Uncle Derwood.”

And Rita stood and jumped him from behind. Then the other brother, Clement, hit him while they were all swinging him about. Then he shook his shoulders and Rita went flying, and Adele kept following him about, hitting him every step he took, and finally he turned about and grabbed her by her left ear and twisted it.

“Don’t ya be twistin little Delly’s ear!” Derwood said.

“Don’t you touch my ear, you bully,” Adele screeched.

Rita came back up flying with both fists then and managed to hit Joe twice in the mouth. Then Derwood and Clement said they would call the cops, and they went to pick up the telephone. But as soon as they did, Adele came to life and tore it out of Clement’s hands.

“You’re not getting the fucking cops here!” Adele shouted.
She banged the receiver down and went at Joe again, fell to her knees, and bit his thigh.

The next morning they were all sleeping in different parts of the house. And they woke to rain pouring down over the oil barrel and the sky dark and the September grass wet and cold. Joe was the first up, and he took a bottle of shaving lotion and mixed it with some beer, and sat at the table, shaking. Then Adele got up and dressed to go out. She came downstairs with a huge bandage on her ear that looked like a doughboy was stuck over it. “Well, someone has to go out and get something to eat to keep this family from starving right to death,” she said to him.

“Yer not going to wear that goddamn doughboy-looking thing out, are you, darlin?” he said shivering and stuttering.

“I wear what I have to to keep my ear from bleeding right to death – it’s just like the same when I was in Brownies and you come home drunk and mauled all my cookies,” Adele said, and she left the house.

When Rita’s brothers got up, Joe looked at them and smiled weakly. They both mooched about for a drink and Joe called a taxi to bring up a pint. Then they reprimanded him while he sat there, and painstakingly went over the reasons why he should quit.

Then they boarded the train that night, shaking their heads because he was asking them to stay just one more day, and had followed them to the train.

The same fascination with herself that had caused Myhrra to get married, was the same that caused her to get divorced. That is, she saw the doorknob turn and she decided to get married; she was sure Mike would come back to her and she got divorced. They fought over everything, even the coat hangers in the front hall. But this was not done for the reason it seemed to be done, but for the exact opposite reason. The more she took coat hangers, the more Mike kicked her in the bum; the more she scratched his Legion dart trophies, and buried them where he’d never find them again, the more she actually did not want to get divorced at all. They fought They hauled Byron by the arms, standing out on the street while people looked on, and Byron screeched that they were hauling his limbs off. The more they fought, the more it seemed that they wanted nothing to do with each other. And yet they needed each other as much for the divorce as they did for the marriage.

Now Byron was bringing his friends home and saying he hated her in front of them. He walked about with a dark expression on his face. Though he was only young he
scared her and she would always give in to him. He would always make a comment at her expense to make his friends laugh. Then they would go into the bedroom together. He would say: “Hi Mom, how’s tits?” Or something like that.

She worried that those friends measured him by how many rude comments he could make to his mother, who was loving to him and had never done him anything wrong.

Myhrra was seeing the priest now as often as possible. With this new crisis in her life, with this feeling of being alone, she needed a priest to talk to. Father Garret, Allain’s brother’s youngest, a tall, unnaturally thin man, was the priest who counselled her at this time. Using a measure of his sociology classes from university, and his own desire to be looked upon as understanding, along with his abundant dislike of the type of men on the river, especially men like his uncle and Joe Walsh, he gave Myhrra a sympathetic ear. After each visit, Myhrra had the feeling of being pure and good – simply because she had talked to the priest, who of course believed in the “new” church – which she considered much more open. Myhrra liked the fact that people saw her coming and going from the priesthouse or talking to “Father” in the yard.

But still, Mike was remarrying and no one could change that. The priest finally told her this one night when she went to see him.

Everything Father Garret said after that remark took on a different meaning. Instead of liking her, he did not. Instead of being sympathetic, he was jealous of her. Instead of being sensitive, he was filled with that terrible piety. Suddenly she remembered him sitting on a bait box as a boy, out on the wharf. She remembered she was seventeen at the time, and they were playing “Rock around the Clock” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” He had just
come from church with his mother, and his feet were covered in dust, and they were gossiping while the sun hit his eyes. Men walked about him, working, their clothes dirty and their faces strong in the wind. He looked over at Myhrra. He was a tall gangly boy. There was some hay on his left shoe.

All of this she saw again in a second, as she stood in his office off the main hallway, and she now felt that they had lied to each other right from the start. That is, she had over-emphasized all of her problems, and he had tried to show a sympathy which he could not really give.

Myhrra left the priesthouse. She walked out into the cold. She lit a cigarette and then another. She smelled burnt paper and railway ties, and she remembered all of the years she was going to go away on one of those trains. Suddenly she cried, and for some reason began to curse Rita.

“Best friend,” she said. “Best friend – what friend do I have?” And at this moment she ran toward home in the wind.

Myhrra got Byron ready to go to the wedding. She got him a new white shirt, and found his suit was so small for him he wouldn’t be able to wear it And though she had made comments about Mike and how he was supposed to give her money for child support, it was she herself who went downtown and paid for Byron’s new suit. Then she had to get him new shoes.

She wanted Byron to look his best. The night before the wedding, Myhrra had all his clothes laid out. She had
taken his new shoes out of the box, and put them at the foot of the bed, and had laid his pants over the chair.

It was a clear night. The air smelled flat and cold. In the trailer, there were little drafts the source of which she hadn’t been able to find, no matter how often she’d gone about touching the walls.

The next morning when Byron got up he said his egg wasn’t cooked right. A little of the yolk was running and he wouldn’t eat it This idea of being pampered whenever he had to do something gave Byron the edge on his mother.

“I don’t feel like eating the egg,” he said.

“Well, you have to eat it.”

“Well, I’m not going to eat it.”

Myhrra, who was drinking a coffee, and looking out at the cold, flat, and somehow at that moment spiteful-looking field, told him that he’d better eat it. The smell of the egg, the flat sky, the barren field – all of this depressed her.

He upset the egg and stomped out of the room.

Myhrra didn’t bother with him. She got ready and went out to the car and started it.

But when she came back in Byron had his old clothes on and was feeding his guppies.

“I have to drive you up to the church, Byron – you have to be there in a half-hour.”

“Not going.”

“You are so going.”