The Brothers K (35 page)

Bet’s scowl was gone now, because her mind had eased down into a place where hiss of sprinkler, splash of drops and babbling of brother were all just soothing sensations. But Freddy was still watching Peter’s face, and still listening when he said, “But to believe in them! To believe enough to
remember
them.
That’s
where we blow it! Mountain lakes? In
me?
Naw! Jesus we believe in, long as He stays out of sight. But the things He said, things like
The kingdom of heaven is within you
, we believe only by dreaming up a heaven as stupid and boring as our churches. Something truly heavenly, something with mountains higher than St. Helens or Hood and lakes purer and deeper than any on earth—we never look for such things inside us. So when the humps of witchiness come at us, we’ve got nowhere to go, and just get hurt, or get mad, or pass them on and hurt somebody else. But if you want to stop the witchiness, if you want to put out the fires, you
can
do it. You can do it if you just remember to crawl,
right while you’re burning
, to drag yourself if that’s what it takes, clear up into those mountains inside you, and on down into those cool, pure lakes.”

Bet was half asleep by now, and Peter was gazing at the spray as if into a blaze, when, quite suddenly and quite loudly, Freddy burst into tears.
“What!”
Bet shouted, jumping clear to her feet. “Is it a bee-sting? What
is
it?”

“I’m sorry,” Freddy sobbed, hiding her face. “I’m sorry. But … but I’m just so
glad!”

“Glad?”
Bet was flummoxed. “About a bee-sting? About
what?”

“The mountains!” Freddy whispered, eyes closed, tears streaming. “The lakes.”

F
or a believer in the empirical method and an acerbic critic of religious hocus-pocus of all kinds, Marion Becker Chance was surprisingly fond of making prophetic statements. Her prophecies were invariably dire. She made them only in the privacy of her apartment. Her “chosen people”
were invariably her grandchildren. Her purpose, however, was far more pragmatic than that of the usual doom prophet: all Grandawma really wanted out of a prophesy was to scare our pants off. Having personally experienced, as an inmate in an ancient British parochial school, how much quieter and better behaved a quailing, apprehensive child is than a happy one, she would do her prophetic best, whenever our boisterousness threatened her china or fragile furniture, to create an atmosphere conducive to the dread of untold evil and impending disaster.

Unfortunately for her possessions, we were on to her. Though she used her irony-armored voice, hawklike face, red-rimmed eyes, innate pessimism, disastrous past and palsying to considerable effect, we knew all along that she was no prophet. She was just an overgrown Famous Scientist in disguise.

Her favorite doom prophecy was a surprisingly anemic specimen. It went something like this: “The one thing, perhaps the
only
thing you can all be certain of, is that your lives are going to be very different, and probably very much darker, than you’ll ever dream or expect as children.”

“That’s great news, Gran!” was Everett’s famous reply to this. “I was expecting I’d turn out exactly like you!”

Poor Grandawma. Another common doom, this one foretold for the twins as soon as they grew old enough to act the least bit giddy around little boys, went like this: “You think you’ll grow up to marry a handsome prince, don’t you? Well, let me tell you something, young lady. You shall, you shall. And
that’s
when you’ll find out that the fairy tale has it backwards. A few kisses, a few years—that’s all it takes to turn the handsomest prince on earth into a big, ugly frog.”

Freddy’s best response to this came when she was seven—and already a discerning student of her big brothers’ vernacular. She said, “You mean like Charles de Gaulle?” Bet’s most interesting reply to the same prophecy had come a year or two earlier. It went, “I’ll
never
kiss a boy! Not even a prince. But if I do, I hope he turns into a cute little doggy.” We were difficult kids to scare.

In 1965, however—in the midst of a religious Cold War that
had
begun to scare us—Grandawma finally made a prophecy that had the desired effect. It was that same anemic one she’d made a dozen times at least to my brothers and me—about our lives being doomed to turn out differently than we expected. This time, though, she found a way of giving it some real oomph: not sixty seconds after she said it, she died.

·  ·  ·  ·

I
t was a bright, sunny spring morning. The twins had spent the night on the hide-a-bed couch in Grandawma’s livingroom. Their joint plan for the day was a bus trip down to Portland to visit the city zoo and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry—the Famous Scientists’ Medina and Mecca. Grandawma’s health had been fine. In fact she’d been on a roll, bustling on foot around the school basements, libraries and junk stores of Camas, begging or buying old microscopes and chemistry sets, butterfly nets and lab notebooks, fossils, gyroscopes, geodes, atomic charts, Indian artifacts and anything else she could think of to enhance and prolong the twins’ science phase. The three of them were seated together at her little oak breakfast table, eating oatmeal and drinking orange juice and tea, when it happened. Freddy had just idly recited the Quaker Oats motto aloud:
“Nothing Is Better for Thee Than Me.”
But Bet—whose mouth had been full of the same tepid bite of the stuff for two or three minutes—took vehement exception: “That’s a lie!” she blurted, dribbling milk down her chin.
“Tons
of things are better for thee than
oat
meal!”

“It’s an exaggeration, certainly,” Grandawma said. “But you’ll not leave this table till you finish what’s in your bowl. And if you speak again with your mouth full, I’ll double your helping.”

“It’s
the Right Thing to Do,”
Freddy read from the box.

Bet sighed, rolled her eyes, and started lapping milk from the bowl with her tongue.

“Stop that at once!” Grandawma snapped.

“I’m a kitty cat,” Bet said gloomily.

“Perhaps you were. But now you’re human.”

“Whooo saaaaays?”
she meowed.

“Your sister and I, and this nice Quaker gentleman on the box,” Grandawma replied patiently. “We are going on a scientific expedition today, and cats are infamously inept scientists. Just look at the way they dissect mice and frogs.”

“I like
playing
Famous Scientist,” Bet said, unscientifically slapping her spoon against the gluey mush in her bowl, “but I don’t want to
be
a scientist. Not when I grow up.”

Grandawma scowled, both at the statement and at the slapping. Bet looked to be in a state of rapid devolution. If the trend continued, she might lapse clear back into one of her
Irwin
moods! It would be the ruin of the day. Marion Becker Chance narrowed her eyes and sniffed loudly. The time had definitely come to brew up a little behavior-altering apprehension: “You may well grow up to become a gargoyle, or a harridan, or a
guttersnipe!” she snapped. “We can’t possibly know—and thank goodness not! What most of us become as adults would
terrify
us as children.”

It was working better than usual: Bet had already stopped slapping her spoon, sat up straight, and was betraying no feline qualities whatever as she peeped, “Why?”

But Grandawma decided she’d best rub it all the way in. “I don’t quite know,” she said, unleashing the palsy now, and glowering far off into a hideous future. Then out she came with it: “I only know that the one thing, perhaps the
only
thing we can always be certain of, is that our lives will turn out very differently,-and very much more darkly, than most of us ever dream as children.”

It may have been a bit cruel, but it was also an unusually effective piece of behavioral engineering: the two girls stopped eating and reading and stared morosely down into their bowls, their hands neatly folded, their rambunctious little mouths closed, their comportment perfect. The room was silent, but for the tidy
ing of the electric wall clock. Marion took a grimly satisfied sip of tea, placed her cup in its saucer with a dainty clink, and was about to broach the subject of the Natural Science Exhibit they’d be studying at OMSI that day when, for the first and last time in her life, her behavior modification technique backfired and became a genuine act of prophecy:

First she looked up at the ceiling and said, “
Oh!”

It was her last word. She said it softly, but with such hushed enthusiasm, perhaps even delight, that the twins’ immediately looked up at the ceiling too. But there was nothing there but plaster.

Next Grandawma closed her eyes, opened her mouth, and slowly began to bow her head—another thing they’d never seen her do. Bet later said, with a somewhat wooden air of piousness, that it looked as though she’d been bowing her head to pray. But Freddy said not. Freddy said she bowed so slowly that it was more like an OMSI exhibit they’d once seen on the laws of kinetics. To me this seems the likelier explanation, since when the center of gravity passed the meridian the bowing head became a falling head that didn’t slow or alter course till Grandawma’s brow smacked the front rim of her cereal bowl, the milk and oatmeal splashed up onto her neat gray bun, and the bowl stayed balanced, like a little cap, right there on top of her head. The twins gaped at her, saying nothing. Grandawma gaped down at the floor, also saying nothing: Her arms were folded neatly in her lap; her rambunctious old mouth was closed; except for the food on the floor and the bowl on her head, her comportment was
perfect. The room was silent, but for the tidy
ing of the clock. She’d even stopped palsying.

Then—quite suddenly—she bounced, as if she’d had a single violent hiccup.

It was her final movement. Peter later theorized that this bounce had been caused by the soul’s departure from her body. Everett, however, ruthlessly maintained that it was only the soul
attempting
to leave her body, and that since she’d never believed in it the poor thing was so weak and malnourished that rather than fly away it could only “hop, then croak—like one of those prince-cum-frogs in that backasswards fairy tale she was always trying to scare the twins with.”

Either way, when our grandmother, or the top half of her body, came down from the bounce, the forehead missed the bowl, hit the edge of the table, slid on past the table when the neck bent back, and flopped neatly down between her knees; meanwhile her arms slid out of her lap, her hands swished down her sides, and her free-falling knuckles hit the hardwood floor with a rattlingly eerie clunk which both girls recognized at once as the sound of utter finality.

From opposite ends of the table, they leaned down and peered at her. She didn’t move. She didn’t make a peep. Nor did she breathe. “Are you all right, Gran?” asked Beatrice.

“She might be all right,” Freddy said. “But she sure is dead.”

“She just fainted,” Bet said doubtfully. “Huh, Gran.”

“She never faints. Anyhow, it’s not stuffy.”

Bet began thinking this over. Meanwhile Freddy slid out of her chair, seated herself, cross-legged, on the floor beneath the table, and took advantage of this unique opportunity to study her first nonliving human without motherly or brotherly interference. “Don’t leave me up here!” Bet cried. And grabbing her little black lab notebook, she too moved down to the floor.

“It
does
look like fainting,” Freddy admitted, studying Grandawma’s head-between-knees posture. “I mean, that’s just how Peter used to sit so he wouldn’t faint in church, back before he started
not
sitting that way, so he
would
faint, so he’d get to leave.”

Bet nodded.

“Maybe dying
feels
like fainting,” Freddy theorized.

“I hope so,” Bet murmured. But she was not up to the usual scientific banter.

“Didn’t look like it hurt much.”

“No,” Bet said—and for a moment it looked as though she might
manage to jot some of these observations down. But then she half gasped, hugged her notebook to her chest, turned to Freddy, and said, “They turn
cold
… don’t they?”