Loretta believed she would have adapted just fine to this situation if matters had not taken a turn for the worse in the eighth year of her marriage, when a minuscule filament of hot steel wedged itself in Blue’s left eye. The accident ironically had not taken place at work, so Charnelle Steel claimed no responsibility. Nearly blind in that eye, Blue returned, after surgery and a month and a half of recuperation, to work, but his disposition soured with the disfigurement, the now endless medical bills, and the bad luck of getting an injury that, if he’d been more fortunate, could have resulted in a handsome settlement and perhaps a semi-comfortable life of early retirement.
Most mornings he left for work by five and didn’t return until six-thirty or seven, later if he happened to stop off at the Armory for drinks and to shoot a little pool, at which he was deceptively skilled, despite his bad eye. When he arrived home on these nights to the house that never seemed to stay clean or uncluttered, the dust growing like moss on the furniture, he often felt the walls squeezing him, a claustrophobic bitterness puddling like acid in his stomach. His wife had grown too thin, with a hostile little smirk nestled in the corners of her mouth, though she wasn’t even thirty yet. She’d always been smart, and perhaps that was the real problem. He’d wooed her away from college. He knew she held against him the life he’d provided for them. But that had been as much her fault as his, if fault was to be found. It seemed unjust the way her lips drew tight like a purse string, the way she seemed to hold him responsible for her regrets, without ever acknowledging that he was the one with the goddamn bad eye, who had to work seventy, sometimes eighty hours a week, relegated to the shitty welding jobs rather than the custom work he’d been trained and paid well to do, and still could do if just given half a chance. Entering the house, he often felt as if he’d been lit on fire, as if his whole body was a breeding ground for army ants, a feeling exacerbated by the holes in his shirt and little blisters and pockmarks beneath the holes where the torches had burned and reburned his forearms and neck and wrists.
Loretta understood how his predicament might embitter him, but it didn’t seem right that he’d sometimes take it out on her and the children, shouting for them to shut up, shut up, just for holy chrissakes shut the fuck up, and after the injury, occasionally and then more routinely striking Loretta, once even with his brown leather belt, the buckle of which left a puncture in her hip that had become infected and never completely healed. A blistered scab chafed under the elastic waistband of her slip.
After these incidents, he would leave, setting out for the Armory or, in lonelier moods, on long drives to the nearby lakes or to the Waskalanti Creek, where he’d get out, take off his shoes and socks, cuff his jeans, and wade into the cold running water, the smooth pebbles caressing his feet. He’d wait for the train to roll across the wooden bridge at five minutes past midnight. Pressing his hands against the posts when the train passed, he would feel the trestle shake and the surprising heat shimmy to the bottom of the foundation. Standing in the cold water and touching those warm vibrating wooden posts soothed him.
After he returned, calmer, contrite even, he’d sometimes take his guitar from the closet, wake the children, and sing to them, ballads he’d learned before he was married, when he dreamed of traveling with a band from dancehall to dancehall all the way to Nashville. Tildon, Melinda, and Tanya warily appreciated this part of the evening and came to recognize it as a prelude to quieter months before their father’s dangerous sap would rise again.
Later, in bed with Loretta, he’d stroke her stomach as he kissed the places where he’d bruised her, and then he’d make love to her with a tenderness that she relished, even if she didn’t like the road by which they’d arrived at this place, nor did she want any more children, and had taken to cleansing herself afterward, once Blue’d fallen asleep, with a foul-smelling potion that she purchased from Maria Fernandez, the midwife who lived in what was back then called Mexican Town on the east side of Charnelle.
The next morning she would stir into a cup of hot tea a yellow powder, also provided by Maria Fernandez, that tasted like formaldehyde smelled. Then she’d spend the rest of the day in the bathroom vomiting and sometimes spotting, even if it wasn’t her time of the month. It seemed to her a heavy price to pay for an hour of tenderness, but she did not want to imagine another child in this house.
On March twenty-second of the twelfth year of their marriage, Blue came home late with more burn holes in his shirt than normal. He’d been to the Armory, where he’d drunk six shots of tequila and lost $28 on a double-or-nothing rack of nine ball. When he arrived, at nearly midnight, he struck Loretta twice across the face and then drove to the Waskalanti Creek and stood under the trestle in the ice-cold water, waiting, but the train never came. He’d missed it. After a while he felt soothed just the same by the hooting of the owls, out now for spring, and the purr of the tequila in his body, which rendered him, as it often did, feeling more alert than sleepy, though he knew even in his drunkenness that he might not remember a damn thing the next day. He drove home and woke the children, who patiently listened to him strum a song he’d written himself years ago called “Long Train Rolling,” followed by a particularly soulful rendition of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and then he kissed them and carried Tanya to bed, nearly toppling over the nightstand in the children’s room.
“I love you,” he said, and lingered by the door.
After a long pause, Melinda said, “I love you, too, Daddy,” though Tildon remained quiet, feigning sleep. Tildon knew what his father wanted, but he could not bring himself to appease the man’s wish to be forgiven.
Blue shut his bedroom door, shed his clothes into a puddle, and stretched out over his wife and began to kiss her. She pushed him away.
“I’m sorry, honey, I’m so sorry,” he said, and then wept for a good ten minutes. “I’m a sorry bastard, I know. Sorry sorry sorry.”
She remained unmoved. He pried her knees open, cooing into her ear. She felt and then, surprising even herself, acted upon an impulse to claw his back and his face. He cuffed her clumsily across the temple, but she didn’t make a sound. He held her arms down, and they wrestled on the bed until Tildon knocked on the door, tentatively whispering, “Is everything all right?”
Tildon’s words provoked a momentary truce, both of them unsure what to do next. Blue said, “Get on back to bed, son.”
“Mom?” Tildon said, and Loretta heard, alongside her son’s fear, his desire to help her. Please, he seemed to be telling her, please please tell me what I should do, and please don’t have me do a thing. That voice broke her heart.
“Mind your father,” she said as lightly as she could.
They heard him retreat, and then, without resistance, she let Blue finish what he’d started, holding the headboard so that it wouldn’t thump against the wall and alarm the children any more than they were already alarmed. It was over in a matter of minutes. She pushed him off her. He rolled over and fell asleep.
She opened the door. Tildon and Melinda sat huddled in their pajamas outside, their backs against the wall.