The Brothers K (101 page)

When Irwin’s first finished stove broke a seam during a midnight test fire, dumped its coals, and burned a bear-sized hole in the back wall of the garage, I figured that might be the end of the new hobby. But the very next day—again consulting no one, and showing no concern for the
ruin he’d left in the garage—Irwin nailed a fourth wall onto Papa’s old pitching shed, poured a rough concrete floor, built some crude shelves and a worktable, again set up his crummy equipment, and proceeded to spend longer days than ever, banging and clanging away at God knew just what. “Maybe his own crematorium,” Linda grumped.

P
eter hadn’t worked long at the mill before he and Papa’s old friend Roy had become buddies. In fact, when Roy learned of another machinist who didn’t want to work graveyard, he took the shift just so he and Peter could get better acquainted. Pete was living so close to the mill that he walked to work alone each midnight. But every morning, a little after eight, he and Roy would come driving up the Clark Street hill in the same old Travelall Papa used to ride to work in, and Mama would feed them breakfast, Roy would do a bit of handymanning around the house, Pete would drop off a book for Bet or Freddy, a toy or treat for Nash, or most of his paycheck for Mama. Then he and Roy would step out to Papa’s backyard shed.

Peter’s sole interest in visiting the shed was, of course, to see how Irwin was faring—and the monosyllabic, humorless workaholic he’d find there invariably left him depressed. Roy’s interest, on the other hand, seemed to be entirely in the woodstoves—and what Roy found, just as invariably, seemed to delight him. “Buck up,” he’d always tell Peter afterward. “Irwin’s comin’ along great!”

Peter saw no point in calling Roy on this wishful thinking, but there was no question in his own mind that improvements in Irwin’s welding or riveting techniques were no proof of corresponding improvements in his psyche. After a few weeks, though, he couldn’t help but notice that the only person Irwin was ever truly attentive to—and even animated with—was Roy. And that’s when Peter realized that Roy was onto something: the stove work and the workman
were
somehow inseparable. Struggling though he was to return to life, Irwin was still living in a lonely, pared-down, almost subterranean place. “Stove Land,” Peter began to call it. And the reason Irwin grew animated when Roy came to visit was that Roy was the only person who really did visit: none of the rest of us pored over the joins and seams of his stoves with him; none of us really climbed clear down beside him to share the dull concerns of the gloomy chamber that was all the world he could manage so far. We simply demanded—with
increasing impatience—that he somehow “snap out of it” and come all the way back to our world.

Seeing this, Peter realized something else: since Papa had died, the rest of us had at least been able to share our grief. But Irwin—who’d been almost a part of Papa’s body at the end—was living in a place where one speaks of nothing but one’s work. He was doing his best down there. He was working every day till he dropped. But ever since Papa had left him, he’d been utterly alone with his unspeakable feelings.

So. Ill equipped though he was for such a place, Peter began trying to follow Roy all the way down into Stove Land too.

Dear Mama,

A few weeks after Papa died, that little shaman, Freddy, swiped a snapshot from one of your old photo albums, stuck it in an envelope, and sent it to me without adding a word. I couldn’t imagine what she was up to. I mean, it wasn’t a photo of Papa or anything. But something about it did begin to fascinate me. I finally stuck it on the wall by my cot here, in a place where the all-night floodlights hit, so I could study it whenever I liked. And I’ve ended up liking a lot. In fact my feelings soon went way past liking. One night the little photo opened like a door, and I walked on in, and stayed. It’s become so much a part of me now that I no longer need to see it. It constantly pulls at my feelings like the moon pulls tides. And believe it or not, after that introduction, it’s a snapshot of you and me, Mama. You’ll know the one. Me sitting like a pudgy little buddha in the center of your lap in those washed-out bonegray bleachers down in Oklahoma, late spring or summer of ’52 …

Not a pretty world, the one we’re perched in: the grandstands couldn’t be less grand, and they’re empty but for us; the edge of the infield looks like a big hot terracotta tile; the light, the entire sky is starkest white. But the starkness forces the eye to the two faces. And the thing they most remind me of (again, believe it or not) is a medieval icon. Oklahoma Madonna and Child, you could call it. Both faces flushed, both very serious, and both, above all,
rapt
. That’s where the icon quality comes in. And the reason for our raptness is, of course, not in the photo, but out on the ballfield, making graceful but
ominous preparations, as the shutter opens and closes, to pour a five-and-a-quarter-ounce one-hundred-and-eight-stitched projectile past the bat of some far less gifted athlete.

It’s a beautiful photo, Mama. Even though it’s just us. And though I’d forgotten what a looker you were, it’s not so much a physical or artistic beauty. It’s a unity. What’s wonderful here is that though one face is male and just four years old, and the other female and about the age I am today, they are
the
same
face
: we are the identically dark-eyed, identically short, identically intense admirers of the same unseen hero. And strange as it may sound, it consoles me every day, this little snapshot does—and not so much for its depiction of what we have been as for its suggestion of what we still are. The bleachers empty, but for us. The world around us a little stark, a little harsh. Both of us looking toward him, harder than ever now, day and night. So even the raptness. It’s all come true. I’m not saying this because I like it, or to make “meaning” of our loss. I’m just saying that he is no less wonderful to us, that this unites us, and that our feelings about him will never change.

Trouble is, unless we do something about it, maybe neither will our feelings about each other. I don’t want to stir up old wasp’s nests, especially not now, but life does go on. And knowing us—our tempers, our industrial-strength opinions, our hands-on love for family—I imagine we’re bound to collide again one day. I just want to say, before we do, that I’d love to find a way to collide more gently. There’ll be no burying the hatchet for us, I don’t think. You and I, to start fresh, would have to bury a couple of battle-cruisers. I doubt that’s even possible. But mightn’t it be possible to just climb out of the damned things and let ’em drift away?

It may have been his dumbest mistake, but Papa loved us both. What do you say, Mama? Wouldn’t it be good to keep a few of his classic mistakes going?

Love,

Everett

I
n the spring of ’72, Irwin and Linda—or Linda alone, really—tried to honor Papa by bequeathing his name to their second baby. Poor kid. Even I was enough of a prophet to warn them that every TV-addicted
brat on the block would nick the name to “Baby Hughie” after that moronic diapered duck on the cartoons.

Be that as it may, one day in the midst of that first baseball-less spring, Uncle Truman drove down from Walla Walla—ostensibly to meet “Baby Hughie,” and to see how Mama was making out on her own. But when Truman—the lifelong body-shop man—heard the clanging of sheet metal out back in the shed, he didn’t even go to the house. He just grabbed a six-pack from his camper and stepped straight down into Stove Land. And except for meals—which he and Irwin would both wolf in near silence—Truman stayed in Stove Land for the rest of his two-day stay.

Peter tried his best to cover for them, but Mama and Linda were, of course, offended. Men from small, dark worlds like Stove Land almost always offend women, because there is no gender or domesticity down there. Women and children are welcome in Stove Land, but for the same reason that men are welcome: to work on the stoves.

T
he following weekend Truman was back again—with his camper so full of new tools and welding equipment from his Walla Walla body shop that he had bottomed out the shocks. “Merry Christmas,” he mumbled to Irwin, though it was April. And this time Truman stayed a full week: he had awarded himself a vacation (his first in years) for the “fun” of working fourteen-hour days with Irwin, and instructing him in the use of all the tools.

Their first job had been to rebuild—with Roy’s weekend and after-hours help—the burnt wall of the garage, and to build new shelves and workbenches along every inside wall. “How nice!” Mama had told them as they were finishing up. And away she went to the store for dinner-makings, to reward them. While she was gone, though, they pulled a Christopher Columbus on her by hauling all of her and Papa’s old stuff down into the basement without her permission, and claiming the revamped garage for Stove Land.

When Mama drove home to the sight of Papa-relics in motion, she got very upset—understandably. But before stepping out of the car to give the three stove-freaks a blazing piece of her mind, she waited for her tears to stop. And while she was waiting she heard Irwin suddenly call out to his cohorts in a tone of voice she hadn’t heard since before Vietnam. The nicknames he used were pre-’Nam too. “True” and “Royo,” he called them. That did it. Mama jumped out of the car—

and told them that since they’d already stolen her garage and turned her basement upside-down, they might as well haul the old refrigerator
up out of the basement and use it in the garage, too. “It’s noisy,” she said, “but that’ll hardly bother the likes of you. Fill it with beer to feed Truman.”

Stove Land had won another heart.

I
rwin’s next three trial stoves all burned cordwood without burning down buildings. But every time Linda asked how much he was going to charge for them, he’d mumble that he was still “just practicin’.” His fourth stove, however, was a refined little number with baffles to increase the efficiency and a glass panel in the door, all pieced together so tightly that when you spun the vents shut it killed the fire in seconds. Irwin still didn’t think much of it—which naturally miffed his destitute and neglected wife. But it burned so efficiently that Mama—as a show of faith, and a marital Band-Aid too, hopefully—had Roy and Irwin install it in her livingroom.

Shortly after this installation, Roy’s interest in stoves became more than a hobby: with Irwin’s permission he sank a couple thousand of his hard-earned Crown Z dollars into equipment and sheet metal, then began spending three or four hours each morning after his mill-stint, working at Irwin’s side. The first stove the two of them built together was a slightly larger, more aesthetically-pleasing version of the one in Mama’s livingroom. And Peter—who’d been studying stoves and the stove business hard, if only to master Irwin’s new dialect—took one look at it and applied for a patent.

Irwin didn’t seem to care what the patent application was: he just scribbled his name where Pete pointed. He did the same with the papers that incorporated Roy, Irwin and Peter himself into a business. Roy named the fledgling operation after Papa’s favorite fishing stream: Wind River Woodstoves, they called it.

Dear Everett,

I am writing, at Mama’s request, to spare her the effort of repeating a story she finds almost impossible to tell. She managed to share it with Freddy, Bet, Kincaid, Irwin, Linda and me a couple of nights ago. She then swore us never to repeat it again, except to you in this letter,
and asked us all—you included—never to question her about it, ever. The only reason she has shared it at all is Papa. All their married life, she said, he kept a promise to keep this thing secret. But during our teens—and all our terrible fighting with Mama—he repeatedly asked her for permission to break his promise. He felt that our sharing this thing would have stopped the fighting. But Mama, understandably, didn’t want to be understood on the basis of this secret. All she ever wanted was for it to disappear. So the secret was kept.

Late last summer, though, when he learned that he was dying, Papa pointed out to Mama that once he was gone he would no longer be obligated to keep the secret. He then told her that if she wouldn’t tell us what happened herself, he would write a letter to you, and put it in a safe deposit box to be opened some time after he died. Mama still disagreed vehemently, but she didn’t feel that Papa had the strength to argue. So she promised to tell the secret herself.

She kept her promise just two nights ago. She began by saying that she has only told this thing twice: once to Papa, in an abandoned barn outside Walla Walla, shortly after they fell in love; then to Linda, just last year. But no sooner did Mama say this than there was an interruption—poor Bet, sobbing and apologizing, suddenly, to everybody in sight, especially Linda. It seems that on the day Mama told the story to Linda, Bet happened to hear them talking in the kitchen, then began to realize what was being said. And it just mesmerized her. She couldn’t move. She listened clear to the end, then dragged herself out of the house. And she has kept this thing to herself ever since. Her only lapse was to tell some of the story to Kade once, when she was half-crazy with insomnia and fear, and to make Linda its supposed victim, rather than Mama.

There is no easy way to broach a subject like this, so I’ll just put it out there, much as Mama did. “I was sexually molested by my father.” That’s how she began. It started in Cleveland, in January, 1941. They lived in an old rowhouse, right under the steel mill’s smokestacks. Mama was eleven years old, Marvin nine, Truman six. There was no window in her room, she said, and the roar of the mill covered sounds like the door opening, or the floor creaking. So what woke her the first time was his hands, “one on my body,” she told us, “and one on my throat.” When she realized what he was doing she tried to die, she said, or faint—to get out of her body somehow. But the smell of him—the stale beer and sweat and tobacco—kept her conscious the way smelling salts do. When it was over her father left the room, went to
bed with Beryl, and the next morning both parents acted as if nothing had happened. So Mama tried to do the same.