All through childhood and adolescence, I had feared him, not because he was physically abusive, but for his rages that came with ferocity and unpredictability over major things, like not coming straight home from school, to minor ones, like leaving a light on at night. At those times he had yelled obscenities, cursed all three children and his wife, the world and everyone in it. He had knocked things off tables, flung chairs over, broken whatever was within reach.
As much as I feared the rages, I came to dread even more his cutting, mind-numbing sarcasm and insults. “You fat pig, the boys must line up just to get a smile from someone as fat and ugly as you are.” Eleanor would run from the room in tears. It wasn’t just her. He had a trigger for each of us. My brother fled when he was sixteen, and Eleanor when she was seventeen. I left the day after graduation, a week before my eighteenth birthday, and although I have visited frequently, I have not lived here since then until now.
At twelve, when Eleanor left, I was too young to run away, and I couldn’t understand then why Mom stayed, but now at thirty, I well understand that she no longer has the choices she might once have had. She is as stuck as I am.
The crazy train whistle, I remind myself, and try to remember the circumstances the next time. Before Christmas, and bitterly cold, with snow on the ground and frost-decorated windows. I had to go shopping that day, and was waiting for Mom to add items to my list. Since her heart attack a few years ago, she can’t tolerate extremely cold weather and has given up leaving the house until spring.
“Get some dormant oil spray for the trees,” Dad ordered.
“Dad, for heaven’s sake, let Mr. Garry do them the way he’s always done.”
Mr. Garry has tractors, motorized everything, farm hands to do the chores, and he had included Dad’s one and a half acres along with his own forty or fifty-acre orchard. I thought it was simple generosity for a long time, then came to realize he was also protecting his trees by keeping disease and insect pests out of Dad’s adjoining grove.
“He puts a foot on my ground, I’ll shoot him,” Dad said. “You hear me, you let him in her, he’s dead.” He began to curse and yell and Mom gave me a warning look.
“I added it to the list,” Mom said, almost inaudibly. It would have made little difference if she had screamed the words; his voice filled the house.
I took the list from my mother, glanced at it, and waited for her to count out money. It might be enough, or not.
“And bring me the receipts,” Dad yelled. “All the change and the receipts. You hear me? I want to see it all! And it better be right. Stupid, you think I don’t notice five dollars missing, or three, but I do, and I want the change, all of it.”
I suppose that was what did it that day. I had been making up the slight difference with my own money week after week, watching my savings account erode with the inevitability of a glacier flowing into the sea.
“I haven’t been stealing your money!” I yelled back at him. “And what’s more I don’t intend to get a spray for those damn trees! If Mr. Garry doesn’t do them, they won’t get done. I’m not going to try to spray an acre and a half of trees with a five gallon sprayer in this weather, or in any weather! Sell the damn trees to Garry and be done with them.”
I turned and walked from the room, shaking. I never had talked back to him before.
“You listen to me, stupid! Don’t you turn your back on me when I’m speaking to you! Come back here! Or get your ass out of my house and stay out! Stupid! Thief! Lying stupid thief!”
He was screaming obscenities when I left the house. Briefly I worried about my mother having to listen, but not for long. She had put up with him all my life, and I had no doubt for all her married life. I could still remember nightmarish road trips and my terror that he would hit someone, kill us all, or have a stroke in his fury, and her silence. Now I wished he would get angry enough to bring on another stroke, this time a fatal one.
That is the clue, I think at the table, the whistle came after an especially ugly day or two. Something has to break this impasse. I have to find a way to talk them into selling the property and moving to an assisted-living retirement community. With his meager pension, Social Security, and the proceeds of a sale, they could do it, just barely. But it would be better than living out here miles from the nearest village, with one in a wheelchair and the other too weak to push the chair or help him in or out of it.
Her heart attack happened a few months after he retired, not a voluntary retirement, I suspect, and during those months she dropped a circle of friends. When I asked why she never saw any of them any longer, she said, “Oh, well, you know, when you get older your interests change.” He drove them off, the way he drove off Mr. Garry. In a community of retirees, she could make some friends again, have a few activities of her own.
“But he’s always had an orchard,” she said in the fall when I first suggested it.
“That’s the point. He’ll never manage it again. He can’t.”
“We’ll see,” she said vaguely. “I’ll bring it up with him.”
She will never dare bring it up with him. As long as I can remember, the only way she ever dealt with him was by bending whichever way the wind was blowing, do anything or say anything to try to keep the peace. And apparently she’s oblivious that it isn’t working, and never worked. No one could keep the peace with him.
When we children were all young, she usually tried to deflect his rages from us on to herself, and often it worked, which made me feel guilty. I was the one who tracked in mud, or who failed to take out the garbage, or whatever the particular offense was that time. At the same time I was glad whenever he turned away from me to anyone else.
Whatever any of us does, money will reach a crisis point before much longer. The house is in disrepair. I’m afraid of the wiring, and the water heater is not going to last much longer. I found a job in the village in September, ten miles away, minimum wage, but a job. In the two weeks I kept it, Mom had to call me home three times. He got his chair mired in rain-softened earth, trying to get out to inspect his trees. Again when she set the brake on his chair and didn’t have enough strength to release it, and he couldn’t either. And he had fallen from his chair and she couldn’t get him back into it. I quit the job before my supervisor fired me outright.
He didn’t want a Christmas tree, but I put a small one on an end table. Mom’s smile when she saw it made it worth the gamble that crossing him always was. He hated the lights and wouldn’t have them on when he was watching television, and since that was all hours of the day that he was up, the lights were seldom on, only after he went to bed at night, or when he took a nap. He wheeled into the living room that day, found the lights on and knocked the tree off the table, cursing. I was starting dinner, heard the crash, and hurried to see what happened.
“Clean up that goddamn mess! Get that crap out of here!”
I walked back to the kitchen. I didn’t touch it the rest of the day, or the next morning, and he was a madman in his fury. When Mom started to pick things up, he turned his wrath onto her. She burst into tears and ran from the room to her own makeshift bedroom in the dining room. After her heart attack, we had moved her bed so she could get some rest, and she had not wanted it moved back. Her refuge.
“See what you’ve done!” he screamed at me. “You’re trying to kill us! You think you’ll inherit my land, my trees, sell out and make yourself a little fortune. You want to kill her! Clean up that goddamn mess like I told you!”
Silently I cleaned up the mess. Then I went to see to Mom. She was lying on her bed weeping.
“Why do you let it happen?” I asked, sitting next to her, stroking her back. “You know he’ll kill you with his temper fits. Or he’ll kill himself. But you don’t have to stand and watch. Walk out. Leave the room, come in her, and close the door.”
“It’s the stroke,” she said, still weeping. “It changed him. He’ll get better again.”
“It didn’t change him, Mom. Face it, he’s always had that crazy temper. The only difference is that he didn’t lose it as often before. Now it’s every day. But it’s the same.”
“No. No. He’ll get better. You’ll see.”
That night I heard the train whistle. It sounded closer, almost at the end of the driveway. It was fifteen degrees. I read at one time or another that freezing to death isn’t very painful after the first minute or two. It is said that people begin to feel comfortable and simply go to sleep.
I know why I hear it, I realize suddenly. I yearn to go out and board the train.
The basketball game is over, and I duck my head and pretend to be reading. He doesn’t speak to me as he wheels himself down the hallway to the bathroom. After he finishes in there and is ready for bed, Mom will have a bath and go to bed. And the house will be peaceful and quiet until I go up. The best time of day, when they’re both in bed.
He can manage in the bathroom and his bedroom. There are rails and handholds everywhere, but it’s always a long process, and apparently a grueling one for him. When he comes out in his flannel pajamas with a lap robe around him, he looks exhausted. Around three in the morning he’ll be up again, and then at eight, until a nap. That’s a good hour also. Sometimes my mother and I have a cup of coffee and talk a little, although neither of us has much to say. All day she is on full alert, aware when he’s moving, when he’s settling down for a nap, when he goes in to get ready for bed. She is constantly straining to hear him, and I never say anything when she has that intent look on her face. By the time he’s in bed, she is too tired to stay up longer than it takes for her bath. Fatigue alone won’t insure her sleep. She has sleeping pills as well.
And this is how it will be forever, I think, for her, for him, and for me, or until one of is dead and the other two are free to do something else, or are forced to. Without me, they would have to move, sell the land, go somewhere else. Whenever I call Eleanor in Seattle, there is a baby or a small child crying for attention in the background. She can’t help out. No one knows where my brother is.
If he would just die, I could take Mom with me, rent an apartment, get my old job back perhaps, and start living again. If she goes first, I’ll call county authorities to come take him away. One of his rages will be proof enough that he is insane. But as long as there are three of us, the pattern that has been established is how it will continue to be.
And I yearn for the night train, a trip to anywhere.
During one of our quiet afternoons I asked Mom if she ever heard a train whistle in the middle of the night.
She looked puzzled, then averted her gaze. “I did once,” she said after a moment, as if an elusive memory had come into focus. “A long time ago, when Eleanor was little. A trick of my ears, I guess. There’s no train close enough to hear.”
“Only one time?”
She nodded. “I was pregnant again and there were other things on my mind.”
Pregnant with me, I realized. Had I from the safety and comfort of the womb first heard it with her thirty years ago?
This time when I hear the train I get up. I already have on heavy wool socks, and pull on my boots. I put on my robe, and take my down jacket from the closet. We had to keep our coats and jackets in our rooms, not in the family closet by the front door, where they were in his way. I don’t have a light on, but I don’t need one, the light seepage from under the door is enough. I find my gloves on the closet shelf and put them on. All my actions are dreamlike, unhurried. There’s no need to hurry. The night train is always on time and so are the passengers.
I am at the bottom of the stairs when he comes out of the bathroom in his robe, with the lap robe on his legs. He is turning to go back to his room when I take the handles of the chair and guide it the other way.
“What the hell are you doing? Goddamn it, let go! Take me back to bed!” His voice is loud as I wheel him to the front of the house, then reach around him to open the door. Mom won’t hear him, not with her hearing loss, and the sleeping pill, behind a closed door. He is yelling hoarsely, with a note of panic in his voice.
The cold air takes my breath away and he cries out, then is gasping, pleading. I feel as if I’m floating down the ramp, and turn onto the driveway. Mr. McHenry keeps it plowed all winter.
It isn’t far to the end of the driveway, fifty or sixty feet, and the train is drawing closer, the whistle like a piercing scream. I stop at the edge of the road and set the brake, and Dad is crying and cursing.
I leave him there to wait for the night train.
My bed feels warm after the cold outside, and I’m hardly even settled into it before I fall asleep.
It was a dream, a wish fulfillment nightmare, I tell myself, coming awake very early. It is still dark outside, and I hurry from my room to go downstairs to turn up the thermostat and start a pot of coffee before Mom and Dad begin stirring. The house is very quiet. Too quiet.
While waiting for the coffee, I go down the hall to the bathroom and push the door open, and then on to his bedroom, where the door is already open, the way he left it in the middle of the night. In a panic, I run to Mom’s room, but it is as empty as the rest of the house. A piece of paper on her pillow stirs in the draft from the open door. A handwritten note, dated and signed, from her to me, the letters spidery and uneven.
“My dearest Christy, I love you. I’m taking him out to catch the late night train.”
An Ordinary Day With Jason
BEFORE WE WERE MARRIED VERNON TOLD ME about the family trait that he feared would be so off-putting that I would tell him to get lost. We were in bed on Sunday night, where we had been most of the time since Friday. We were eating stale popcorn, the only food left in my apartment. On Friday we had planned a dinner out and a movie, but the rain had turned to freezing rain mixed with snow.
We made the final commitment that weekend. And he told me. It came up in the most innocuous way.