The Brothers K (10 page)

Irwin’s getting awfully good at fake Bible quotes. He’s picked it up from Everett, who rattles them off so smoothly you’d swear he was giving you the straight Moses till you stop to think about what he said. Mama’s face is a wrestling match, Scowl versus Smile. But the twins are still dangling, and mothers do hate danger. Scowl wins. “That’s enough of your nonsense!” she snaps.

“It’s not
my
nonsense!” Irwin says solemnly. “It’s the
Lord’s!”

The girls make the sounds of twin engines starting. He swings them up to shoulder height again. Mama gets truly mad. “You think you’re so cute! But what if one of those coverall buttons snaps off?”

“This!”
I holler, and I flop back on the steps, writhe like my spine is crushed, roll my eyes up under the open lids, and send a big purple pie-glob sliding out the side of my mouth. Irwin howls. Mama about barfs. The twins barely notice: they eat this way all the time.

“They pin-rolled the dough, Mama!” Irwin yells over their engine noises. “It’s God’s Law! It’s, it’s
out of my HANDS!”
—and he lets out a gasp as the twins seem to leave his grip and plunge toward the concrete. Bet shrieks, Freddy whoops, Mama’s hands fly to the top of her head, and I choke, though only from laughing: if there are any two things I trust in this family it’s Mama’s button-sewing and Irwin’s muscles.

“Ready aim FIRE!” Bet hollers when her skull doesn’t quite smash against the steps, and Irwin zwoops them up and takes off sprinting. Mama watches, her hands flat on her head like a prisoner of war’s, her bare toes writhing in her red rubber thongs, and weird, doglike whimpers rising in her throat. But as Irwin roars round the yard and the twins scream and squeal, as he yo-yos and loop-the-loops them, almost but never quite splintering their sweet little noggins against everything hard, sharp and dangerous in the world, the whimpers move from Mama’s throat down to her belly, change into laughter, and gain volume and power till she’s howling and helpless, her face young and wild and pretty as the delinquent teenaged daughter of the woman she looked like seconds ago. Irwin pretend-trips on the water faucet. He pretend-crushes the girls when he falls. He pretend-screams and flails the twisted arm and leg he’s pretend-fractured. And the three of them, the two of Mama, the
entire five or six of us laugh like there’s nothing funnier in this world than crushed toddlers and fractured limbs.

T
hat was the kind of mood Papa’s upcoming court case put us in. And all week long we
did
“fenk povitive,” and
did
pray for him to win the settlement and the odd but usable new thumb he deserved. Our cause was just, our aim unselfish, our prayers heartfelt and devout.

And on Thursday, Papa lost.

School: John McLoughlin High
Class: Mr. Hergert’s Freshman English
Assignment: The Long (Long Long) Essay

THE HISTORY OF MY DAD FROM HIS BIRTH
UP TO KINCAIDS’S
BY IRWIN DAVID CHANCE

My father Hugh Chance was born in 1929 in Chicago Illinnois on May 5 1929. He was no relation to Frank Chance the famous first baseman, Dean Chance the famous young pitcher, or Fat Chance the famous expression (ha ha). But his father Everett Chance, named after my brother (you remember Everett!) was a mathamatics professor at the Univercity of Chicago (Illionois) who really wished he was a Pro Ballplayer, and almost was once, for the Cubs right there in Chicago, who weren’t so bad at times in those days, and Wriggly Field has always had one of the finest parks in all of Pro Ball inspite of its got no lights. The father’s wife (Hugh’s mom) Marion Becker Chance however never liked baseball, for Marion was an Englishwoman and could not for the life of her understand it. The game of crickit on the otherhand is practicly nothing but English baseball, which most Englishmen live and breath for, yet Marion never liked it either. So maybe she just wasn’t cut out for sports.

Marion did very much like Charles Darwin the famous scientist so
hated by such Christians as our pastor at church Elder Babcock due to Evolution however. Marion Becker Chance has always been an extremely serious type woman, who for instants loves to go down to OMSI more than anyplace else on Earth as they call the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry for short, and lovely spots such as the beach find her buried in rocks at feet of cliffs with her back to the beautiful blue ocean, digging around for fossils and such.

Besides a Scientist Marion is also a Pacifist and an Atheist. This means she is basically against most things, such as War, Sports, and God. Don’t get me wrong here. She is a fine woman in her way. Just a bit too serious and sinnical, we feel. My brothers Everett and Peter (you remember Pete!) think this wierd outlook of Marions must of started up because her two brothers or maybe three were either all three or both killed during W.W.1, which Marion calls The Great War, inspite of W.W.2 being Greater. It also probably never helped when both her parents died shortly thereafter of a combination of broken hearts and the Spanish Inflewenza. Anyhow The Great War destroyed England forever, Marion claims, inspite of it still being there as I like to kid her, although kidding Marion is about like feeding the pearls before the swine in most cases, since pearls, swine and Marion all laugh about the same amount. Anyhow this destroyed condition of England was why Marion Becker Chance migrated to America, along with sorrow being the other chief reason. But then she turned around and never became a U.S. Citizen either, which later had very serious aftereffects for both her and my dad both, by whom I mean of course our hero, her son, Hugh. In 1928 however, Marion cleaned up her glum act long enough to snag a big southpaw math teacher at the Univercity there in Chicago, named Professor Everett Chance as mentioned. But we call him Everett Senior to fend off confusing him with our own Everett, who we call plain old Everett, for short.

Getting on with our story then, Everett Senior according to reports was about as All American of a guy and as great of a guy as a guy could get apparently, thereby proving what they say about opposites attract so far as him and long-faced English Marion was concerned. Unfortunately Everett Senior is also now dead at present, almost as if everything Marion touched turned into a corpse at some fairly quick point in time. In my heart I feel that this bad luck of hers is a big fat HINT, and that things would go much better for her if she would only except Christ as her personnel Lord and Savoir. But as our Everett says, it’ll be a snowy day in H-E-Blank-Blank before Marion Becker
Chance does a thing like that. Meanwhile she continues to love Charles Darwin, hate God, Sports and War, and be known to us as Grandawma since that was how Everett said her name when he was a tyke and it stuck, and to this day her apartment resides less than a mile from our house here in town, unfortunately allowing no pets so that her skanky bulldog Gomorrah stinks it up here with us. But I like her. Grandawma I mean. Gomorrah too, as far as possible, I suppose.

Getting back to the son my father Hugh. After six years of life in Illinoiss he can’t remember all that well due to his smallness during this period of time, Hugh moved to Pullman Washington where he grew up due to his dad Everett Senior took a job there at the State College of Washington (
GO COUGS!!
) to teach mathamatics as usual, but also to coach Varsity Baseball as well. He didn’t tell Marion about the baseball part till after they were in Washington however, which turned out to have loud and violent aftereffects.

Getting back to the parents here a minute, Everett Senior felt it wasn’t any of his wife’s dang business, him deciding to coach baseball. Whether or not the man should wear the pants in the family, he should at least be allowed to wear his
own
pants, was how he felt about it. Marion however felt that the whole family was more or less jammed into one big pair of pants so that everything anybody else did could be bichbichbiched about by anybody else. Of course this goes against everything the Bible has to teach us about mankind, womankind, and the pants. But Marion hated the Bible, so what could you do? “NOBODY IS TELLING YOU TO COACH BASEBALL!” Hugh reports Everett Senior spouting at his firey wife when she kept having duck fits. Hugh gets quite the bang out of chucklingly recalling his folks’s loud and colorful debates of this period, both about baseball and other matters such as

ARE WOMEN TRULY SMARTER?

ARE ATHELETES ALL A BUNCH OF WAR-MONGERERS?

WHOSE TURN TO DO DISHES? and of course

GOD? since Everett Senior was a good Episcopalian as a kid and always believed on Him no matter what, right up until he died in Germany, same as me, except of course I’m Adventist not Episcopalian and have not died, as of yet.

But getting back to the southpawed Hugh here, it is interesting to notice how inspite of her hate of sports Marion

Number 1, was lefthanded and

Number 2, loved to throw things!

Glasses, plates, and even objects, such as large lamps, got regularly smashed to smithereens in hers and her husband’s loud and colorful debates, Hugh reports. Gladly, neither opponent came to much harm, except how words will sometimes cut deep, between throws. There were close ones though. The most famous close one for instants was this fork Marion hurled clear across the kitchen only to stick deep in the oak table between two of Everett Senior’s helpless fingers. To Marion’s shocked dismay however this only overjoyed the stalwart husband, by proving that both sides of the family had tremendous arms, so surely young Hugh would have one also!

Getting off the subject here a minute, this same oak table resides in our kitchen to this day, causing my brothers and me while eating dinner, breakfast, lunch, between-meal-snacks or whatever to break out pondering those four deep forkholes.
She
is so
skinny!
we ponder.
And only four foot eleven!
we ponder.
How the heck did she
do it! So one day Pete and Everett decided to experiment, throwing forks at a similar type piece of wood at a similar type distance and angle till totally exhausted, and listen to this! THEY NEVER STUCK A ONE! This finding began to make what Marion did seem like a total Miracle, or as young Kincaid says, like a total waist of a Miracle. But at the Miracle Point here it is interesting to notice how the experiment hit each of us four brothers different, depending on the type of person we were. Everett for instance, a Doubting Thomas Type, decided Marion must be lying and actually just stabbed the fork into the table trying for Everett Senior’s hand. Peter on the otherhand, a Religious Type though a bit weird from such Christian standpoints as my own, felt that anger is so powerful of a force that a really powerful anger could convince a thrown fork to stick superhumanly even if we can’t stick one ourselves under more regular types of conditions. Meanwhile myself, a Faithful Adventist Type, agreed with Pete, as did young Kincaid, a Fairly Normal Type who by the way will be in your class the year after next and is one smart cookie Mr. Hergert! Anyhow, Papa finally got so sick of us pondering those four deep fork-holes that he filled them with puddy and painted the whole table dark green.

Getting back off the sidetracks then, Everett Senior instead of becoming a famous math genius or fossil expert such as Marion hoped in his spare time became Varsity Baseball Coach at Washington State College from 1936 up to 1942, which is a pretty famous thing to be itself if you ask me. You can still see his picture and read about him in old Cougar yearbooks, and you’ll find his name proudly listed under
COACH on the trophy in that glass case at the football stadium there, for winning the League Crown once, in 1939. HOW MANY MATH AND FOSSIL EXPERTS’S NAMES DO YOU SEE LISTED ON THAT TROPHY? is what I sometimes want to ask Marion. I don’t do it however, as she is quite old and rickety enough as is.

B
rother Beal has stuck me in The Corner again. What happens in The Corner is you sit facing the wall with a Bible in your lap till you’ve memorized this week’s Memory Verse. What Brother Beal hasn’t yet figured out is that I don’t learn my Memory Verses on purpose. I like it in The Corner.

There are six of us here this morning, which is about average unless it’s some verse such as
Shew me a penny
or
Jesus wept
. Beal’s helper, Sister Durrel, had to scour the whole basement to come up with enough Bibles for us. Then, when she was passing them out, she smiled and gave the only illustrated one to me. I about died! Sister Durrel is so beautiful compared to everything else at Sabbath School it’s like my eyeballs turn into compass needles, and she’s North. One time up in church I stared at her so long that Everett got embarrassed and gouged me in the ribs, telling me to knock it off, but I gouged him right back and said, “Why should I?” He gouged me again and whispered, “Because Sister Durrel is at least eight years older than you, and engaged to Brother Beal, and if she was your age she wouldn’t have breasts and her thick brown hair would be in scraggly pigtails and she’d be as knobbly-kneed and snot-nosed as every other girl you know!” I’ll admit I hadn’t thought of some of that. But I gouged him right back again and said that if she was my age I’d ask her to marry me anyhow: I’d just set the wedding date for the age she is now.

It was by accident that I discovered how much nicer it is getting sent to The Corner than it is sticking with the Sabbath School class. The main trouble with the class isn’t Brother Beal’s lectures, which are only boring. It’s these cockeyed study groups they break us up into. After a hard week of
real
school, the last thing a person needs first thing Saturday morning is some goody-goody mom or dad grilling them on this Sabbath’s lesson in
Pathfinder Magazine
or My
Little Friend
. The Corner is supposedly a punishment: you sit with your back to the class, and you
can’t talk. But what good is freedom of speech if all you can use it for is answering goody-goody study group questions? To me it makes more sense to get thrown in The Corner, where the freedom of not-speaking allows you to sit back and rest. Resting is what Sabbath is all about anyway. It’s what God Himself does with His Saturdays. It’s right there in the Bible, Everett says: “Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work, but on the Seventh Day God rested, so human beings should do the same. And getting all gussied up and going to church is
not
resting.” All Mama ever says to that, though, is, “Pipe down and get your tie on.”