On sunny days the cock gleamed brightly, as if strutting. On overcast days, much of the winter in the foothills of the Adirondacks, the cock emitted a wan, sullen glare.
That weathercock! No matter how many times you’d seen it, always you glanced upward, to the peak of the roof. Always you were taken in, imagining the copper cock to be alive.
John Henry too seemed always to be noticing the weathervane cock for the first time, calling, whistling to it, laughing and waving in a pretense that the copper cock was a living bird and in fact one of the “garden angels” sent to earth to “keep an eye” on him.
Behind the Braam house was a large barn with a stone foundation, unpainted plank walls, and a steep, rusting tin roof. There were sheds, a chicken coop, a silo in need of repair, a few remaining farm animals (two horses, several Guernsey cows, Rhode Island Red chickens, barn cats, and a dog named Bessie). Needing continual upkeep was the barnyard, which stank of muddy manure and rotting hay, and the miles of barbed wire fencing, tasks that fell mostly to John Henry.
I live in a stone house. I am married now, and my husband doesn’t need to farm, he is foreman at the quarry.
It was a boast put to Lizabeta’s family, who’d sent her away at fifteen to live by herself in Sparta, years before. Her mother, her sisters, her girl cousins living out beyond Star Lake in the mountains, whom she hadn’t seen in a decade and had no expectation of seeing again.
It was so; most of the fifty acres were uncultivated now. Walter planted a few acres in corn, wheat, hay to feed the animals. But his workdays were spent at the quarry, not on the farm. Close beside the house, John Henry plowed and helped maintain a half-acre garden (tomatoes, pole beans, peppers, sweet corn, tangled vines yielding squash, pumpkins) for Lizabeta.
“Aunt Liz’beta” she was called by John Henry in his singsong, grating voice.
John Henry’s quick shy eyes lighting on her, and away in nearly the same instant. John Henry’s wormy lips moving, working as if with words that teased him, impossible to utter. John Henry’s narrow muscled shoulders slouching, as if at his height of more than six feet, at least five inches taller than Lizabeta, he might make himself smaller, unobtrusive.
Aunt Liz’beta was the murmur, John Henry’s horsy face darkened with the blood of surprised excitement, arousal.
John Henry was so good with the children, though: adored Agnes, Melinda, Alistair as if they were his own little brother and sisters, whom he’d protect with his life.
Or maybe—for who could fathom what went on in John Henry’s head, buzzing like a swarm of hornets?—John Henry thought that the young children in the household were not Uncle Walter’s children but somehow, who knows how, his.
He would never hurt them. He would never. He is so good-hearted. And the children love him. Never complains, such a good worker! My husband’s nephew. He lives with us. He has no other home on this earth.
The Spill. It would happen at the Spill, in October 1951.
When Melinda was three years, two months old. When Agnes was six and big for her age. Sharp-eyed, inquisitive. A restless child, with Walter Braam’s pale, slightly protuberant eyes and his air of willfulness. Never go anywhere near the Spill, Agnes had been warned repeatedly. Something terrible could happen to you at the Spill.
These were Lizabeta’s words. There was no need to warn Melinda, who was still too young even to trail after her sister out into the fields and woods and hills.
Lizabeta hadn’t known of the Spill until she’d been living in the Rapids for several months as Walter Braam’s wife. Hadn’t seen it until the following spring, when water came rushing across the rock formation in a single frothy, churning stream like a river, to empty into the Black River below.
It was Calvin who’d shown her. He’d driven her into town, to buy groceries in the Rapids, and on the way back he’d driven past the Braam house, another half-mile or so, to point out the Spill to her, from the road.
“The Spill. I can see why it’s called that.”
“Dan and me, we’d play there. When we were little. Pa would’ve warmed our asses if he knew. A boy from school, Duncan Welleck—the Wellecks live a few miles away—he’d come with us, climbing up the Spill. Once he fell and split his damn head open, bled like a pig, but we got him home okay and Pa never knew.”
It wasn’t like Lizabeta’s stepson to confide in her. It wasn’t like any of the Braams to confide in her, or to speak of Walter in such a way. Another woman, a more imaginative or cunning stepmother, would have seen her advantage and asked Calvin more about disobeying his father at the Spill, or anywhere; but Lizabeta was shy, uncertain. When you must remember to keep your lips pursed shut when you smile, not to reveal your chunky, stained teeth, you are inclined to be shy and uncertain.
The Spill was two things: the contorted rock formation, like a small humpbacked mountain, and the water that streamed down it from the Adirondacks. Much of the year, several small streams rushed down the Spill to enter the Black River below, but after heavy rains, and during the spring thaw, the shallow streams converged into a single whitewater stream that rushed across the rock face to spill over a twenty-foot drop into the river. (The Black River. Lizabeta had no sense of where this river went, or where it came from: higher in the mountains? She supposed. It was an accident that Lizabeta even knew what the river was named; people in the Rapids referred to it only as “the river,” which had a stretch of jagged rocks and a turbulent whitewater rapids just beyond the Rapids bridge. One day Lizabeta would see a map of New York State and discover how the Black River turned like a great snake, traversing Herkimer County at a diagonal to empty into Lake Ontario, seventy miles to the west. On this map the Spill was far too small to be marked.)
In late summer the streams of the Spill had become so shallow that most of its rocks were exposed, harmless. In a severe drought, the Spill was dry. Anyone sure-footed and unafraid of heights could make his way carefully across the Spill, a distance of about fifty feet. (Almost, Lizabeta could imagine herself clambering across the rocks herself. Except she was pregnant at the time. Seems like, looking back on those years, Lizabeta was pregnant much of the time.)
It was when the water level rose, often rapidly during a rainstorm, and the several shallow streams converged into a single rushing stream that the Spill was treacherous.
Beautiful to observe at a distance. Treacherous to approach.
That day, Calvin said, “It’s just some freak of nature, Pa says, why it got shaped like it did. In school they tell you it was glaciers. A glacier is an ice field—ice mountain. This was a long time ago, a hundred thousand years ago.” Calvin paused importantly, to let the weight of such a figure sink in. “See, the way this is, the things we see, where we live, it wasn’t always like this. How things were exactly, nobody knows. Nobody could remember that far back. Except the Spill, that’s some old freak thing from that time. That wouldn’t ever happen again, now the glaciers are gone.”
All this while Lizabeta was staring at the waterfall, and a stream of glittering water cascading down a steep hill, or hills, that rose up above them, blotting out half the sky like a mountain shoved close. Lizabeta knew, though she couldn’t see from her seat in the pickup, that the water was falling into the river, hidden from sight by underbrush. Lizabeta’s dry lips had parted; her heartbeat had quickened. Calvin seemed to be imparting some message to her, but what? She could not think of a thing to say in reply. Oh, she hated being so clumsy with words, when words meant so much! Calvin leaned his arms on the steering wheel, staring through the pickup windshield at the Spill. Calvin was a lanky boy of nineteen with tufted dark hair, a blunt profile, slightly stubbled jaws. Stepmother and stepson sat in the old Ford pickup staring at the Spill a short distance from the road—falling, frothy, splashing water, glittering with light like broken shards of glass—for how many minutes Lizabeta could not recall afterward, until Calvin backed the pickup around on the gravel Braam Road and drove back to the house.
“Don’
t tell Pa I took you to see the Spill,” Calvin said, with a mirthless little laugh. “He don’t like us wasting gas.”
You was the most her stepsons would call her. Not Ma, and not Lizabeta. There was just no name for her, their father’s second, young, hugely pregnant wife.
Some of these facts about the Spill would be stated in the newspapers. The granite outcroppings, the shallow streams that rose rapidly to form a single rushing stream after a heavy October rainstorm, the Black River, where, three miles downstream, caught in concrete rubble beneath the Constableville bridge, the body would be found, naked, so badly broken, the face so battered it was scarcely recognizable.
2.
“God knows—he didn’t give me the strength.”
Dorothy Chrisman spoke literally, it seemed. Lizabeta’s sister-in-law from Sparta, who’d “given up” on her son John Henry and sent him away to live with her family in the Rapids.
In Dorothy’s husky smoker’s voice there was an air of reproach that meant God knows—he did this wrong thing. As in Dorothy’s ruddy, coarse-skinned face there was a small grim look of satisfaction. So you were led to be agreeable, as Lizabeta was, to sympathize with the aggrieved woman. To take Dorothy Chrisman’s side against God, who’d done the wrong thing to Dorothy.
There was this tendency in the Braams, Lizabeta had noticed, to be resigned to something gone wrong, even as, with their brooding and reproach, they knew where blame was located.
“You’d think God gave you a damn hard burden deliberately, he’d give you the strength to bear it, eh? You’d think.”
Quickly Lizabeta murmured, Yes. You would think!
Outside, John Henry was calling—crying, it sounded like— Chick chick chick CHICK, chick chick chick CHICK, scattering seed for the red-feathered chickens, two dozens hens and two roosters, which was one of John Henry’s farm chores he performed twice a day, always efficiently but always noisily. You could hear John Henry talking to the chickens, a stream of excited, warm, friendly chatter, interrupted by John Henry’s laughter, though his words were muffled. His mother, Dorothy Chrisman, listened, exhaling cigarette smoke through wide, dark, outraged nostrils, and said nothing, pointedly.
It was one of Dorothy’s rare visits. Once or twice a year, at unexpected times. Braam relatives often visited the farm and were welcome to stay as long as they wished, or almost; but Dorothy, who’d grown up in the Rapids, seemed to have acquired a distaste for it. She worked as a nurse’s aide at the hospital in Sparta and had “no man to support” her. Stating this fact, Dorothy looked pointedly at Lizabeta, who, as Walter’s wife, clearly had a man to support her.
John Henry called his mother Mama. In a pleading, childlike voice incongruous with his height, spindly arms and legs, and age: “Mama!”
In her mid-forties, Dorothy looked a decade older. She was a short, mannish woman with a habit of wincing as she laughed and the fine-creased skin of the longtime smoker. Red lipstick on her mouth shone like grease; the rest of her face was bare of makeup, raw-looking and singed. It was mysterious how John Henry seemed to know that his mother was coming for one of her rare visits when Lizabeta herself didn’t know. (For Walter never informed her. Nor was it clear that Walter informed his mother, elderly Mrs. Braam, who was Dorothy’s mother and did not like surprises and upsets in the routine of her invalid life.) “Why can’t you tell us that Dorothy is planning to come home with you?” Lizabeta dared to ask Walter, in a pleading voice so that he might not take offense, and Walter said how could he tell anyone, he didn’t always know himself. His sister hated to be “pinned down.”
Walter laughed, acknowledging that yes, his sister could be a bitch.
What was cruel was that Dorothy planned her visits to be short: she arrived with Walter, unannounced, had supper, stayed one night, and returned to Sparta at seven o’clock the next morning, when Walter left for work.
John Henry’s Mama no sooner arrived than John Henry’s Mama departed.
Dorothy never brought a gift for her sister-in-law Lizabeta, just inexpensive little drugstore gifts (bath powder, fancy soaps) for her mother and her aunt and “supplies” for John Henry. In the young man’s presence Dorothy was distracted and grudging, and the actual number of minutes she spent with him was brief. There was John Henry chattering away excitedly, hoping to entertain his unresponsive mother, telling her more than she wanted to know of his farm chores for Uncle Walter and his “special pets” among the farm animals and the “garden angels” who watched over him and spoke to him in a secret language (in thunder, in rain, in wind; in the creaking limbs of the giant elms about the house; in the cries of birds and wild animals in the night). The more Dorothy frowned, the wilder John Henry’s claims grew. A fever seemed to come upon him in his mother’s company. Unless Dorothy restrained him, John Henry began to rock from side to side, head, neck, torso bobbing as if he were a rubber doll; his eyes glittered, his lips gleamed with spittle. You could not be certain when John Henry spoke in this way whether he was being as fanciful as a young child, testing the credulity of adults, or whether he was serious. Maybe there was no difference. In another part of the house Lizabeta felt pity for him, poor John Henry, hearing his bleated, repeated “Mama, Mama,” which sounded as if he were pleading with his mother.
Yet no matter his mental age, which seemed to oscillate wildly, John Henry exercised the tact of an adult, thanking his mother profusely for the “supplies” she brought him, unwrapped, in a Sears shopping bag: socks with reinforced toes and heels, thick cotton underwear, flannel pajamas, khaki work trousers, a coarse-knit sweater too small for John Henry’s stooped, muscular shoulders. Some of these items didn’t appear to be new purchases but appeared secondhand, worn or even soiled; Lizabeta wondered if her sister-in-law, a nurse’s aide at the Sparta hospital, pilfered them from the rooms of patients who’d left them behind or had died. But John Henry never betrayed the slightest disappointment with his mother’s gifts, thanking Mama and trying to hug her around the neck and kiss her cheek even as Dorothy chided him for God’s sake not to “squeeze the life out” of her.
Lizabeta, who adored her young children and was anxious for their well-being virtually every minute of her waking life, could not comprehend her sister-in-law’s cruelty to her own son. Seeing Lizabeta’s face, Dorothy said to her, smirking, “If you had a special case like John Henry, you’d know how it is.”
Lizabeta thought no, she would not. She could not imagine behaving in such a way with any child of hers.
Lizabeta was never easy in her sister-in-law’s presence, as she was never easy in the presence of any of her husband’s family. Elderly Mrs. Braam thought nothing, in her rambling monologues, of comparing her son’s “new wife” to Esther, who’d been a “saint,” and even the grown boys, Calvin and Daniel, who were polite to Lizabeta, seemed frequently to be exchanging glances in her presence as if amused by her, or scornful. Dorothy, who was critical of all of the family, including even her brother Walter, was given to telling Lizabeta, in a pretense of sisterly intimacy, as if she couldn’t confide in any of the others, “Just hope that someday God doesn’t pull the same trick on you, Lizzie.” (“Lizzie” was the pretense, Lizabeta knew. But she smiled weakly, to acquiesce.) “It’s a man’s world,” Dorothy continued, with her angry wincing laugh. “Hank Chrisman, the boy’s father—he walked out. He keeps his distance. Can’t blame him, eh?”
To this Lizabeta had no reply. Blankly she stared at the ashes her sister-in-law was letting spill over the side of the ashtray.
“Well, you can’t understand. Only the mother can know.”
Lizabeta felt the rebuke. A hot, heavy flush rose into her face.
Lizabeta had been born with a rosy, smudged mark on the lower right side of her face, so that her cheek had the look of having been slapped. At such times she felt the birthmark burn and darken. She felt her sister-in-law’s eyes move upon her, bemused.
Walter had told Lizabeta that his oldest sister had been the only girl in the fam
ily to leave the Rapids and to train for a job. She’d been a nurse’s aide in Sparta, where she’d met and married this Chrisman when she was nineteen and had John Henry when she was twenty-two. Chrisman worked for the railroad and was often out of town, and in recent years it wasn’t clear—for not even Walter wished to ask Dorothy—if the two were still married after more than a decade of living apart. Lizabeta had noted how in his rapid chatter to his mother, John Henry never asked about his father, or anything about his Mama’s life in Sparta. Did he lack the mental capacity to imagine Mama somewhere else? Or had John Henry, after several years of living in the Rapids, forgotten Sparta?
As Lizabeta was forgetting. And good riddance!
If Calvin and Daniel were in a mood—playful-mean, taunting-teasing—to suggest to John Henry that his father was on his way to the farm, John Henry immediately became excited and anxious, hunching his shoulders to make himself smaller, shaking his head and whimpering, “Is not. Is not.”
It seemed clear that John Henry did remember his father. Remembered something about his father. Lizabeta tried to intervene, to assure him that his father was not coming, his cousins were only teasing.
“Is not. Is not!”
Once an idea got into John Henry’s head, it was difficult to dislodge it. John Henry, usually docile, could become not just frightened but angry like a dog that has been baited, in danger of snapping, biting.
Only rarely did John Henry scuffle with his cousins. Calvin and Daniel knew better than to seriously torment him. Of course, it was forbidden to tease John Henry at all, in any cruel way to upset him: if Walter were home, the boys wouldn’t have dared. John Henry liked to be teased gently, as you’d tease a young child to make him laugh, not cry. To make him feel loved, not mocked.
It was often said by Braam relatives that John Henry wasn’t what the Herkimer County school district had labeled him—“retarded”—but was “just pretending.” (Why? No one could say.) Some of the Braams even believed, as John Henry seemed to, that he was watched over by a higher power, his “garden angels” or God. The boy was smart enough in his own way, wasn’t he? But Dorothy didn’t see it this way. Dorothy, who was John Henry’s exasperated Mama, who’d worked for twenty-five years at Sparta General Hospital, said bluntly that John Henry was a “birth accident.”