Shine Shine Shine (21 page)

His father was suspicious of Emma and her intentions. “What do they want with you, boy?” he would say. “They want a boot boy? They want somebody to send down the wells?” His father was also suspicious about the brown woman that lived with them in their house. Nu was an anomaly, the only person in the county who wasn’t “white.” While most of the neighbors accepted her and asked her patient questions about where she had lived in Burma, others never believed she wasn’t just a common Negro. Maxon’s father was one of these, and talked with spit flecks on his lips about the evils of letting a Negro or a Mexican take root in the county. The truth was that Nu had come from Burma to help Emma raise Sunny because Emma was pretty sure she shouldn’t do it by herself.

When Emma returned from Burma, she wanted, most of all, to raise Sunny in an environment tolerant of eccentricities, where she could be as normal as possible. She could think of no better place for Sunny than the obscure, detached, rural county where Bob Butcher had grown up. Bob had always talked about it, rhapsodized about it, its tiny pointed country churches, its oil wells everywhere. Emma knew that if she took Sunny to Yates County, Sunny would be one of them, a family member. She would become a local fixture, like the people Bob had laughed about with the perpetual garage sale outside their house, or the eccentric millionaire, holed up in a stone mansion on a hill, who had invented Post-its. Her people were there. She would be at home.

She bought the Butcher farm from Bob’s parents. They were happy to sell it to her; they had long since moved to Florida, where they could be in the sun and near their other son, the good son who hadn’t gone off and gotten killed for being a missionary. Selling the farm to Emma meant being done with her and her odd child, so they did it without hesitation.

Emma was constantly on the phone and downtown in the lawyer’s office, caught up in legal matters and the sale of Bob Butcher’s chemical formulas to pharmaceutical companies. The shrewd deciphering of years of scribbled notes and research documents, all cover for his work as a missionary, had yielded her several interesting findings. These turned out to be of significant value to modern medicine. After the patents had all been drawn, the documents had all been signed, she came away a rich woman, able to live where she liked and do as she pleased.

So Emma set up camp in the old farmhouse, and sent for Nu from Burma. Nu came with her nats and her animist creeds, and her sturdy legs. She planted pounds on pounds of beans in the summer, hoeing endlessly and pulling in bushels of vegetables to can. She shot her rifle to scare off crows, shot her rifle to scare off a deer, shot her rifle to scare off a handful of people in the middle of the night, escaped from Warren State Hospital, and circling the house making mooing sounds like loose cows. She cooked, cleaned, and slept hard in the back room, her rifle and her shrine beside her bed. She worked endlessly with Maxon on identifying facial cues, reading body language, understanding the meaning of words like “regretful” and “obvious.” They practiced sounding like English was their first language. For Nu, it was vocabulary that got in her way. For Maxon, it was syntax.

Sometimes there were stretches of time where his father would go on a trip and leave the older brothers to run the farm. Those were the good times. Then Maxon was free. Once his mother had even left town, leaving Maxon, at the age of nine, without a parent for two weeks. During this time, he stayed with Emma and Sunny, but he slept on the porch, where he was more comfortable. Sunny tucked him up like a doll before she went to bed, brought him a book and a bedside lantern. “You turn out that light before you go to bed, Maxon,” Emma would say, before shutting the door. Still in the morning the light would always be on, the book collapsed on his chest, and a hundred moths stuck in the lantern, trying to get out. Nu fed him prodigiously when he stayed with them, and he went away just a little bit fatter, not so sticklike.

When Maxon’s father, Paul Mann, was home, those were the bad times. Maxon’s father was a tall gruff man, hunched and neckless. His pants hung down from suspenders on his bony shoulders. He had a gray beard half grown and a half circle of sweat appeared around the neck of his yellowed T-shirt. He was constantly in motion, always muttering, his watery eyes blinking rapidly. He had many projects: lumbering, tinkering, drilling for oil, hunting, and trapping.

It was unclear to Emma if the family had money problems or if their lifestyle was chosen by preference. The man always seemed so busy, he couldn’t be a deadbeat, and yet they hardly spent money—Maxon and his older brothers were usually in rags or close to it, the house was falling down, and the barn leaked. The hundred or so dilapidated vehicles across the pastures were used as sheep pens, pigpens, and storage for other auto parts and pieces. Maxon’s father was a proud hoarder, filling his garage, his barn, his outbuildings, and his house right to the rafters with things he might need in the future—tools, parts, scraps, animals, and sons.

Bob Butcher’s parents had had a charged relationship with this obstreperous neighbor, frequently finding him or one of his shady cousins cutting timber over the other side of the hotly contested property line. The older sons spent their Saturday nights drinking home brew and cruising the back roads in one of their old clunkers with the lights off. You could hear them crashing into trees, spinning their tires in the gravel, and honking the horn in the darkness.

Emma tried to leave the Manns alone, knowing instinctively that Maxon would bear the brunt of any conflict. Once, however, Emma literally ran into them in a car. She had Maxon and Sunny in the back, Nu in the front, and they were all headed out for ice cream, after which she planned to return Maxon to his house. She would get him there in time to be at work at 5:00 p.m. as usual, to avoid his father’s anger. They were winding down the dirt road toward the river, where the tires inevitably skidded and the road dipped and skipped without warning. Suddenly, Paul Mann’s truck came roaring up out of the valley, and smashed directly into the front of Emma’s little Honda Accord. The truck slid back then, slipping on gravel, and banged into a tree. It dangled perilously close to the edge of the hill, but it was firmly stuck. Mann stomped the gas, stomped again, sending up a spray of rocks and dirt. But the truck was immobilized. He hopped out quickly, began pacing; his fat wife slid out of the passenger side, instantly crying and picking at herself. She was a humble figure, dim in her eyes and thin in her hair.

“Children, sit still,” said Emma. “Are you hurt?”

They weren’t. They were huddled together in the backseat, Sunny’s leg over Maxon’s knee, Maxon’s arm around Sunny’s neck. It was fine. But Paul Mann was angry.

“Woman!” he said. “I told you not to pull on me like that when I’m driving.”

“Paul, Paul!” gurgled the wife. She wore a flowered sundress without shape, sleeveless and cotton. She must have weighed three hundred pounds. Emma could not imagine what kind of pulling was taking place between this squanchy, wet person and her tall, fierce husband. Then Mann pulled back his hand and smacked his wife across the face. She bounced back, her face almost comically registering the most predictable expression of shock. Then he bent his tall frame over the front of his truck to inspect the damage as if nothing had happened. Nu was now incensed, and while Emma rushed to Maxon’s mother to help her to her feet, Nu stomped her small sharp self over the gravel road to Mr. Mann and poked him firmly in the backside with her foot.

“Hey you, piece of shit,” she said. “You piece of shit, you treat your wife this way? What kind of man are you?”

“Go to hell,” he growled, taking his time examining his fender. She lifted her foot again, balancing impeccably on one tiny foot in the road. She gave him another sharp poke and growled back. He slowly righted himself, pulling himself up to his full height. “Who the fuck are you anyway, some Mexican?”

Mrs. Mann was crying into Emma’s shoulder, blood spouting from a split in her lip, her bulbous nose running freely, small eyes red and apologetic.

“I ain’t sorry for him,” she declared angrily. “He’s too big for this county? No he ain’t. He thinks he is, but he ain’t.”

Nu’s face registered nothing but serenity as she laid a roundhouse kick on Mann’s knee, just behind the joint. He was shocked, and fell like a tree gnawed off by beavers, right into the road.

“Shit!” he yelled. “Holy shit, the Mexican! Get her, Laney!” Nu followed her roundhouse with a deft kick to the sternum, knocking the wind out of him. He grabbed his throat, coughing, his eyes bugging out.

“You kilt him! You kilt him! Aoww!” keened Mrs. Mann, sobbing anew.

Emma, mopping up Mrs. Mann’s face with the flowered dress, quickly interrupted. Ignoring his rolling eyes and the fact that he was sitting in the middle of the road, she addressed him politely: “Mr. Mann, I believe you need a tow truck. Can I take your wife into town to make the arrangements? I don’t mind. Then I can bring her and Maxon back to your house at your convenience. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Yeah,” Ma Mann joined in with enthusiasm, “Miz Butcher’ll take me to town, and I’ll send Pete back for y’uns with a winch.”

Mann glowered at them from the road where he sat, then sighed deeply, defeated. “All right,” he grunted. “I’ll walk home, it’s only ’bout a mile. Pete can find the damn truck. We wuz just comin’ to see what y’uns had done with that boy.”

“You not gonna leave that truck here half in, half out of the road,” said Nu indignantly. “You stay here, direct traffic, you big booby.” Then she stepped back into the car daintily and shut the door. “You children just be quiet back there,” she told them unnecessarily, smoothing her black braids and patting down her demure collar. “Everything under control.”

Mrs. Mann, emboldened by this display of female power, marched over to her husband and stuck her grubby, sweaty palm out firmly. “Now I need money for town,” she said, her mouth turned down like a toddler’s.

“How much,” he growled, grubbing in his pocket.

“I want much dollars,” she said truculently. “I’m going to town.”

Later, when they were driving, she was quiet, sandwiched between Emma and Nu. Behind them, the children were still quiet. There was really nothing to say. But Sunny had seen something new, something she had never seen before. In the front seat, here was the sniffling and bubbling Mrs. Mann, fatly rumpled and pressed between the cool and collected Emma Butcher and her small terrible Nu. They came to the end of the dirt road, hit the two-lane highway, and accelerated.

Sunny said to Maxon, clearly, “Does your dad hit you like that?”

Maxon’s mother threw one hammy arm over the back of the seat and said, “No, he never done ’at. He never would done ’at, neither. Paul loves his kids. He’s a bad husband to me, but he loves on his kids with the best of ’em.”

Maxon regarded Sunny coldly. He wouldn’t say anything. She knew, looking at him, that this was not the truth. She knew what her mother knew when she went over to that house for the first time, that dropping Maxon back into that was dropping him into poison. And as capricious as she sometimes felt, and as many times as she thought her mother was spending too much time on Maxon, helping him learn about singing and piano, and all the signs and charts she made for him, and the way she explained things again and again, when Maxon wasn’t even listening, when Maxon wasn’t even looking, and the way they had to stop in the middle of stories again and again to figure out why, how does this person feel, why did this person do that. She knew, even though she was only eight, that it was worth it.

And Emma knew, in the front seat, next to this mountain of blubbering guilt and all her victimization, that the child back there, the child back there in the backseat with her child, was hers to save. That she could save him, but that he was forever damaged. And where she had felt before sort of missionary about it, sort of selfless and helpful, as a crusader, as a nun, she now felt protective for Sunny. Who was she to bring this awfulness into her child’s life? She hoped she had not done too much. She hoped it could be, in some way, undone. And yet, when she looked in the rearview mirror and the way the children were wound around each other, she saw that she might now be too late. Maxon was different. Sunny was different. They were different together. And whatever bad, messed-up thing was true down in him and down in her, it would be hard to separate them.

*   *   *

I
N THE ROOM, IN
the middle of the hospital, there was a life struggling to stay alive, trying to stick around and fix it. Everything that had been allowed to happen, and everything that had not yet happened, could all be rectified, could all be set straight. In the womb, in the middle of Sunny, there was a life struggling to come alive, struggling to make its way blinking out into the world. In its life, there had yet been no mistakes. There had been no love, no sadness, no peace, no fear. There had only been sustenance, and a shallow range of experiences. Yet this life, insentient, wanted only to push on to the next place, out of the darkness, on to the next thing, to the broader range. One hung on, one pushed forward. As one pushed forward the other was pushed forward as well. It was a death and a life happening, all at the same long time.

18

Sunny was watching the NASA channel and missing Maxon. All they ever had on the TV when he was home was cycling or the stock market. He didn’t care about entertainment. It was hard not to be distracted and frantic, when he was not around. She hoped that in the last five years of her life with him, she had not ruined their marriage and their love together. Once she had only been for him, had only been busy with loving him. She had laid herself up next to his full, knobby length, and had been equal to it, perfectly equal. They were like a graft, like a new creation, from long association and also perfect love together.

When she got pregnant for the first time, Sunny was afraid she had to become something else. When you become a mother, how can you be another thing at the same time? When you become an orphan, how can you be anything other than that? She worried now that everything she became had just squeezed the love out, until she might only sort of love him, only used to love him. Maybe she forgot how to fill up the rest of it, because it’s full of other things—orphan-to-be, mother. Maybe you can’t truly wrap your flesh around another person, after there’s been a baby inside you. Maybe your parentless sorrow puts you in a box with those who have the same sorrow. Her mother was dying. She wanted Maxon, the old Maxon, the way it used to be. And yet she knew that he had always been the old Maxon. It was she who had changed. Yet everything else she had tried to become was stupid and pointless.