I can’t tell you how much I think of old times, Clarence. Old times are on my mind ever since you left.
One thing I got to say, Clarence, and I have to say this again — it has been on my heart and it is so heavy I can hardly bear it — I never meant it that day when you got the A in science. I just don’t know what happened. I’ll carry it to my own grave I suppose. I’ve never felt more ashamed and I want you to know that. I carry it in me like the world’s heaviest thing. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I just want you to understand. I think understanding is more important than forgiveness. So please understand. Sometimes it just weighs the whole of me to the ground so much I feel like I’m bending over when I walk.
Eleanor always uses the same line at the end of each letter:
Like we said, you keep your handsome head down, Clarence, and come back to us in one piece and don’t go making us spill the river with tears.
On the evening that the war officially ends in stalemate, they receive a letter from Clarence to say that he will remain on in the demilitarized zone. He should be home shortly. He hints that he has met a girl at the army base: she is a nurse’s aide and she has painted a bowl of grits on the front of his cook’s helmet. The letters arrive monthly — one of them even comes when Clarence is on R&R in Japan. Eleanor keeps the stamps in a special envelope.
And then one afternoon, in the late summer, they receive another letter. They open it with their heads hung penitently. They already know from a two-week-old telegram that Clarence has been injured. A knife rolls slowly through the top lip of the envelope. Walker feels a bead of sweat roll down his spine. He uncurls the sheet of paper very slowly and hands it to Eleanor to read.
She throws her arms around him in simultaneous relief and grief when she reads the letter. The letter has been dictated by Clarence to the nurse’s aide. It takes a moment for Eleanor’s eyes to adjust to the handwriting.
Dear Mom and Pa,
I am alive and well. I was hit by a mine when I went out walking. We had just clocked off from the canteen, a buddy and me. We were south of Pusan, just going for a walk in the forest at the bottom of the mountain. It must have been a trip wire. I should have listened more carefully to Rhubarb. My buddy, he lost both his legs. Some of the shrapnel hit me in the eyeball and I lost my eye. I’m sitting here trying to be brave about it, but hell. Anyway, the nurses here have been looking after me good, especially that girl Louisa I told you about. She’s right here, scribbling down every word I say. Well, almost every word! She’s from Chippewa country out West. She’s been treating me special. She even went found me a gramophone and some 45s of old Rex Stewart so I can listen to him blow that horn. The radio stations here aren’t so good — all you get is Nat King Cole and all. But I get to listen to old Rex. Just lie here in bed and let him play. My injury doesn’t hurt much. Sometimes it’s hard looking only through one eye, but I reckon I’ll get used to it. Don’t let that river spill over because I’m as good as can be expected. You know that bowl of grits that I told you about — Louisa painted it for me — well, I think that’s about the funniest thing in the world. I’m looking forward to you-all meeting Louisa. We are good friends. Well, more than good friends to tell you the truth. And you know what? I understand that day, now, I understand that day, Mom, in the warehouse when you said you didn’t know me. In the Army you learn not to know yourself at all. And I got to thinking. And I know what you’re saying. So I understand and I forgive you, Mom. Well now, I don’t want you to get getting weepy, so I’m going to sign off. One thing is, though, we been thinking about getting a discharge, going back to New York, Louisa and me, start a little business, I don’t know what. Maybe even get married, how about that! Something so we can all go get a big apartment and live together and be happy and no more spilling of rivers for any of us.
The letter is signed: Clarence W. and Louisa Turiver.
Beneath that, a P.S.: I have a feeling that something will grow in the forest where my eyeball is. And beneath that another P.S.: No jokes about the eyepatch please!
* * *
Eighteen months later, in 1955, Walker and Eleanor peep around the curtain separating them from their daughters, slip outside into the corridor — noise of thumping fists coming up the stairs from Hoofer McAuliffe’s place — and walk along, floorboards creaking under their feet, to the shared bathroom. Eleanor puts a finger to Walker’s lips to stop him from laughing. The walls are yellow and smudged with handprints. The tiles on the floor are black and cracked. Eleanor scrubs the basin and wipes the side of it with toilet paper, making the sink immaculate, so that when she shunts up and sits up on the porcelain and lifts her nightdress to take him inside, she feels clean and young, although she’s thirty-eight years along and her body has begun perambulating downward.
“How’re your knees?” she asks when Walker stands on his toes and his back arches.
A vagabond breeze comes through the small open window, leaving the bathroom cool. She undoes the clips at the back of her hair, reaches to touch his hip.
“How’re your knees, honey?” Eleanor asks again.
“Still there, Grandma,” says Walker, rocking on the balls of his toes, biting his lower lip with his teeth to block out the laughter.
She jabs him in the chest. “Don’t Grandma me. I’m not a grandma just yet.”
They remain there, making love, and Walker will remember this forever: the clean sink, the yellow walls, the handprints, the lifted nightdress, the portent of a moth careening wildly below the bare lightbulb.
chapter 9. back down under where you belong
Sounds of scuffling feet, and Treefrog knows there are people at the tunnel gate. Maybe some kids who have come to play Burn the Mole. Or Elijah and Angela making love again, screaming in their ecstasy and dejection. Or Dean with a bundle of boys at his hip. The voices carry, and then someone says very loudly, “Shut up, assholes.”
Flashlights illuminate the tunnel.
Treefrog climbs out of bed and puts on his overcoat, shoves his feet into his boots. He blows out all the Sabbath candles. Perfect darkness. Out on the catwalk, he tucks his overcoat beneath him, sits, leaves his legs dangling over. He sees the beams from the flashlights catch on the snow falling through the ceiling grate and he hears a voice: “Well, fuck me running backwards.”
Eight of them, some in plain clothes.
They bunch close together. The clips on their holsters have been undone. Gloved hands on their guns. They lean into radios as if telling immortal secrets. Their flashlights move frantically, catching on the dead tree planted under one of the grills, moving up and onto the murals and the same voice intoning again: “Fuck me with a bar stool, boys, they even got themselves a tree over here, fuck me.”
“Fuck you,” whispers Treefrog, “fuck you.”
The cops move along the side of the tracks and Treefrog says a little louder, though not loud enough for them to hear, “Oink, oink.”
He pulls his legs up and makes sure he is shrouded and unseen. The last time the cops came down a murdered man had been found under 103rd Street. Nobody knew him; he died with his penis erect, a necklace of bullets on his chest. Dean found the man first and nicknamed him the Boner and the cops came down, running in the darkness like Keystone fools, waving their guns at shadows. They lined everyone up against the wall—“Up against the wall, motherfuckers!”—and frisked them for weapons. There was an argument over who would search Treefrog’s nest; they were scared of the climb. Eventually they brought down a ladder. Although he stole a map that Treefrog had been creating, one of the cops tried to get Treefrog to go to a city shelter. “You live like an animal! You should get some help, man, you’re living like a goddamn rat!” But Treefrog stood impassive with his long hair around his eyes and then began chuckling. The cop slapped him with the back of his hand and told him to take the smirk off his face or he’d end up like the dead man.