John Henry is so good with children; it’s because John Henry is a child himself.
Older children were uncomfortable with John Henry’s antics, and some of them, the boys, were scornful and cruel, but luckily, Lizabeta’s girls were still young enough to be beguiled by their cousin John Henry, who told such elaborate, fantastical tales of angels, talking animals, and special messages that came for him in wind, in rain, in thunder, and in the forlorn cries of nighttime birds. Both girls shrieked with laughter when John Henry waved and called to the “rooster angel” on the highest roof of the house, carrying on in such a contagious way the girls insisted they could see the copper rooster moving, looking down at them.
“Know who he is? That rooster? He’s a garden angel, he’s there to watch me. O-kay!”
Everybody laughed, John Henry was so funny. Lizabeta laughed with the girls. Yet she felt uneasy at times. She knew that John Henry was only pretending—wasn’t he?—but she wasn’t sure that the children understood. When she told them that the rooster was “just a weathervane” and “not real,” Agnes said, with childish disgust, “Oh Mama, we know that.” But Melinda smiled uncertainly, squinting up at the copper rooster and jamming her fingers in her mouth.
Melinda was the sensitive child, just three years old in this drought-stricken summer of 1951. Agnes was brash and confident and clearly took after her father. Melinda was inclined to shrink back, a wan, almost-pretty girl with lank brown hair and mistrustful brown eyes. For Melinda the distinction between real and not-real that meant so little to Agnes wasn’t so clear-cut, for you could have a dream that spilled over into the room—couldn’t you? wasn’t that what a nightmare was?—or you could get so sleepy you felt sickish and your eyelids could shut and in that instant a dream could come up out of nowhere and scare you and make you cry, it’s so real.
Lizabeta thought, Anything we can think, it is real in some way.
This was not a reassuring thought. There were the cruel fairy tales with the terrible endings.
John Henry dreamed with his eyes open, maybe. Lizabeta thought maybe that was what was wrong with him.
She did love him! She didn’t hate him. Who could hate John Henry? It was like hating a puppy who adored you and wanted only to lick your hands like a deranged lover, lick your face with its pink wet soft squirmy tongue.
A child himself. Why he’s so good with children.
When John Henry had first come to live with the Braams, after finishing his farm chores he’d sometimes wandered off in the direction of the small village of Rapids, on the banks of the Black River, about three miles to the east. There John Henry bought his favorite soda at the general store, a sickish-sweet carbonated cherry Coke in a bottle; if he saw anyone working outdoors, in a garden for instance, he went over to introduce himself as John Henry Braam. (Which was not John Henry’s legal name. But he seemed to have forgotten his legal name.) Most people seemed to like him; John Henry was so friendly and childlike. He boasted to Lizabeta that he had many “kind friends” there. In the Rapids, John Henry visited the one-room schoolhouse on Cobb Road that, in the late afternoon and early evening, when he dropped by, was empty of students and locked up; eagerly he tried the front door, peered into the windows, drifted about the small playground as if looking for someone or something. Like a lost dog, or a ghost, observers reported to the Braams. Poor John Henry!
From his mother, Lizabeta knew that as a boy of eleven, John Henry had been told that he couldn’t return to school because he’d been kept back in fourth grade two years in a row and was deemed “unteachable” from that point onward. There were no special education classes in the Sparta school district at this time. There were no accommodations for “retarded” or “disabled” students. John Henry had never done well in school, but he’d liked his teachers and classmates and was baffled to be forbidden to return even to the playground; he couldn’t comprehend that he’d become older than his classmates, and at five feet six towered over them. “John Henry asked me why he couldn’t go back to school and I told him, because they don’t want you, and he asked why they didn’t want him, and I said, because they don’t like you, and he asked why they didn’t like him, and I said, because in their eyes you are not normal like them, you are a freak.” Lizabeta’s sister-in-law spoke with an air of grim satisfaction, as if to indicate that in her dealings with her son, she was never less than absolutely truthful.
Lizabeta shuddered, remembering. Poor John Henry!
Not everyone in the Rapids was so friendly to John Henry. As he’d been in Sparta, John Henry was sometimes tormented by boys and young men who shouted crude, cruel names (Freak! Idiot! Loony!) and threw stones at him, chasing him like a pack of dogs until he retreated to the Braam farm to hide. Once, Lizabeta saw him limping into the barn and found him huddled in the hay in the corner of the barn where the horses were stalled, shivering, hugging his knees to his chest. “John Henry! Did someone hurt you? Who has hurt you?” Lizabeta asked, but John Henry refused to answer, only muttering, “Bad thing! Bad thing!” Lizabeta said, incensed, “Tell me who hurt you, John Henry. I’ll tell your uncle Walter and he’ll see that it doesn’t happen again,” but John Henry just repeated, stubbornly, “Bad thing! Bad thing!” Lizabeta was incensed on John Henry’s part, yet more as Walter Braam’s wife, for it seemed to her an insult, an insult against the Braam family, that anyone in the area should dare to torment Walter’s nephew, knowing who John Henry was and where he lived. Lizabeta stooped to touch John Henry’s shoulder, but John Henry recoiled from her with a whimper, as if her touch scalded.
He wants to be alone, Lizabeta thought. Like a wounded animal, to lick his wounds.
Among most of the Braams it was believed that John Henry didn’t feel pain, or cold, or heat, as other people did. John Henry had to be called indoors sometimes, so he wouldn’t freeze his fingers and toes shoveling snow after a blizzard, and John Henry had to be prevented from working in an open field or repairing roofs in blistering hot sunshine. If John Henry injured himself in a fall or cut himself and bled all over his clothes, he was likely to chatter and joke about it—“Bad thing! Bad thing! O-kay!”—as if he were embarrassed by his own clumsiness and eager to change the subject; for John Henry understood that his value was in his work, and in his willingness to work, and his place with the Braams was a matter of work. On his face, hands, and forearms were numerous scabs, scars, burn marks. His shaved, stubbled head bore scars and dents. His pale blue eyes leaked moisture that ran in grimy rivulets down his face but were somehow not “real” tears, for John Henry didn’t cry, not as a “normal” person might cry.
John Henry had to be called John Henry, and both these names had to be equally sounded, for if you called him just John—or teased him, as Walter’s sons sometimes did, with variants of his name like John-John or Hen-ree—John Henry would become anxious and agitated, as if he’d been scolded. Why this was, no one seemed to know. Or why John Henry only ate hot oatmeal, which he prepared himself, for breakfast, morning following morning; or why John Henry could not bear to see any animal killed, and shuddered at the sight of meat, and refused to eat any meat, just vegetables, potatoes, coarse brown bread. John Henry favored certain of the farm animals but not others, as if there were personal animosities and feuds among them that only John Henry and the animals could understand. Many times John Henry got into quarrels with animals and chickens; you could hear his high-pitched voice at a distance. (Was John Henry serious or just pretending? Lizabeta wondered if he might be both simultaneously.) You could tease John Henry if you teased him gently: “John Henry! The moon is looking in the window at you.” Or, “John Henry! There’s one of your ‘garden angels’ checking up on you.” (An ugly black crow on a fence railing, which did seem to be tilting its head and fixing a yellow eye on John Henry.) You could cajole credulous John Henry into seeing things with his watery eyes that weren’t there: human faces, human figures, animals, angels in the foliage high overhead, in contorted rock formations, in clo
uds. Especially clouds fascinated John Henry in their unpredictable variety, in the way they appeared out of nowhere and seemed to move in the sky of their own volition—coming from where, and going where? Slack-jawed, head flung back, John Henry was capable of staring at the sky for long entranced minutes, claiming afterward that he’d been watching “God’s thoughts” which had gotten loose from “inside God’s head.” More entrancing even than clouds were airplanes passing overhead, a relatively rare sight: John Henry dropped whatever chore he was doing to run into an open field and crane his neck, gape and wave excitedly and cry what sounded like “Me! Me! Me! Me!” (For one of John Henry’s wishes was to be an airplane pilot someday.) In the village, Lizabeta was embarrassed and annoyed by John Henry’s noisy excitement when trucks of a certain size and heft passed by on the country highway, and by John Henry’s enthusiasm for the Buffalo & Chautauqua freight train that thundered through on an erratic schedule, drawing him to the railroad embankment, where he waved and shouted as the cars rattled past. Lizabeta said, “John Henry, it’s dangerous to get too close to a train—you know that, don’t you?” and John Henry fixed her one of his quivery looks, smiled, and said, “Aunt Liz’beta, that train knows me.”
Lizabeta laughed. For John Henry was so funny, wasn’t he. And he adored her, and the children. So good with children, a child himself.
Except John Henry was clumsy with what he called “ladies’ things”—breakable objects, or objects that involved some sort of ritual or fuss. His big paddle-hands couldn’t be trusted with lifting little Alistair, though John Henry loved to watch the baby being bathed by his aunt Lizabeta, afterward dried tenderly in a soft towel and powdered with special white baby powder; John Henry never minded taking away soiled diapers to drop into a bucket of strong-smelling ammonia, in preparation for being washed. (No disposable diapers in those days, in the Rapids!) John Henry was thrilled to be asked to “watch over” Agnes and Melinda when they played outdoors; inside the house, Lizabeta could hear the three of them chattering together, and John Henry’s voice occasionally lifted in a mimicry of her scolding voice: “Mama says no. Mama says no.” There was a rowdy game played by Agnes, John Henry, and Bessie the Labrador retriever that resembled tag; Melinda, whose legs were still too short to carry her with much speed or strength, had to watch from the sidelines. Lizabeta noted disapprovingly that her elder daughter, Agnes, shouted at John Henry as if they were the same size and age; Agnes was bratty, and bossy. Lizabeta dreaded her hurting John Henry’s feelings by calling him a cruel name that Agnes might have overheard him called. John Henry adored his little cousins, was eager to carry them on his shoulders or give them piggyback rides, amid much squealing and laughter. Once, to her horror, Lizabeta happened to glance out a kitchen window to see John Henry crawling on his hands and knees in the grass and Agnes straddling his back, thumping his head and neck with her fists, crying, “Giddyup, horsie! Giddyup, horsie!” as John Henry winced with pain. Lizabeta called from the window for Agnes to stop at once!
She knew that John Henry would insist it “never hurt.” Nothing done to him, especially by children, ever registered as hurt with John Henry.
It was in the dry, scorching heat of August 1951 when Lizabeta was hanging out laundry that she happened to see, on the far side of the back yard, little Melinda pulling off her pink cotton T-shirt because she was too hot, and getting her head caught in the neck so that she staggered in circles shrieking for help, and there came John Henry to Melinda’s rescue, stooping over the struggling little girl and removing the pink top, in the same gesture trying to force it back down over Melinda’s head, for John Henry had seemingly been trained, as Dorothy would grimly say he’d been disciplined, not ever to remove clothing from a child, any more than from himself, except in the absolute privacy of his bedroom or in the bathroom. Melinda was flailing her arms in protest, tearing at the T-shirt in a fit of temper, managing to pull it off again and this time tossing it onto the ground. No.
Lizabeta saw John Henry staring at the three-year-old girl’s bare, smooth chest, the tiny flat breasts, tiny nipples; John Henry was unsmiling, hunched over Melinda, his strained face gleaming with sweat and his hands uplifted, not touching the child, not daring to touch the child, but staring at her, unmoving. In that instant a cold rush of panic coursed through Lizabeta like an electric current, and the conviction came to her with the force of a truth already known but not acknowledged: He can’t live here. He can’t stay with us. He will have to leave.
4.
“Stay here! Don’t follow me.”
Lizabeta snatched at a jacket hanging on a peg by the kitchen door and stepped outside. Bare-headed in the wind, breathless and shivering with a strange sort of exhilaration, and dread.
It was early October. At last the drought had broken. Six days of pelting rain and intermittent gale-force winds had made the old Braam house quake and shredded and splintered limbs from the ancient elms that towered over it. The Black River was said to have risen more than a foot, and the Spill once again rushed with a single churning whitewater stream cascading into the river. Restless from being trapped indoors for so long with fretting children and elderly invalids, before even the sky cleared on the final day of rain Lizabeta hurried outside.
Especially Lizabeta was worn down by Agnes, who’d been running and shrieking like a demon on the stairs, “playing” by making a racket and tormenting her younger sister, refusing to eat, refusing to take her nap in the afternoon, throwing off Lizabeta’s restraining hands with little cries of insolence. Hate Mama! Hate Mama!
Lizabeta hadn’t heard. A mother does not hear. All you can do is ignore. A child like Agnes, a fever that will pass.
For the past six days school had been suspended. Part of the Braam Road had been washed out. Traveling to Sparta to work in the early morning, returning from Sparta at dusk, Walter and his sons had to drive fifteen miles out of their way on partially flooded roads. Walter had brought home a few groceries from Sparta; there hadn’t been any deliveries to the general store in the village, where Lizabeta usually shopped. Nor had Lizabeta been able to get into the village, in any case.
Elsewhere in Herkimer County, on lower ground, there’d been serious flooding. Roads, bridges washed out, houses destroyed, several deaths. Yet it was a time of exultation! For now the October sun shone through dripping foliage with a fierce blinding light that made Lizabeta’s eyes hurt in the way that, at times, Agnes’s fierce insolent face made Lizabeta’s eyes hurt.
Choked with rage, wanting to whisper to the child, “Yes, and I hate you too. Bad, bad girl.”
Her younger daughter she loved. Melinda, who smiled at her mother with love and the neediness of love. And little Alistair she loved. But not Agnes. No longer.
It would pass, this feeling. It was a fever that would pass. As Lizabeta’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Braam, had told her, the willful little girl would “come round.”
Of course. Lizabeta understood. Six-year-old Agnes was not a demon but an energetic little girl, a bored and restless and fretful little girl who didn’t really hate her Mama but loved her Mama.
Yet Lizabeta had to escape, for just a few minutes. Alone, so that she could breathe, for just a few minutes. In the bright gusty damp air, riddled with droplets of water from the trees that fell on her bare head and face like rain, Lizabeta walked swiftly, blindly. She would hike along the lane, through the fields, and to the riverbank; there was a path there. On rocky soil she would hike to the Spill, then return, a half-hour perhaps, had to breathe and had to be alone, oh but she was out of breath, panting for breath; since the baby, since the babies, Lizabeta had gained weight, her belly and her breasts were slack, fatty thighs no longer a girl’s supple muscled thighs but the thighs of an older woman creased and puckered and it disgusted her, made her want to scream, how the fleshy insides of her thighs rubbed together now, a damp slapping sound, a sound Lizabeta was sure others could hear, her stepsons Daniel and Calvin, her husband’s nephew John Henry, whose ha
bit it was in Aunt Liz’beta’s presence to quickly avert his eyes from her even as he chewed at his lower lip.
Those raw yearning boy’s eyes. She’d seen from the start.
Wanting to scream at them, as at the children: I am more than this, my body. A woman is more than her body.
As she neared the hay barn, her feet in ratty sneakers already soaked through, Lizabeta heard a cry behind her and turned to see Agnes on the back porch, calling something after her in a petulant, high-pitched voice. Lizabeta shouted at her: “Get inside! I said—get inside! Don’t follow me! Bad girl!” Her voice was choked with rage, she hadn’t known how much rage, shaking her fist at the child and threatening to go back to hit her.
When Agnes hesitated, Lizabeta ran a few steps in her direction with her fist raised.
You wouldn’t. Would not ever. Strike that child. Not ever.
With a final defiant shriek, Agnes ran back inside the house.
Lizabeta hoped that no one was watching: elderly Mrs. Braam, or Mrs. Braam’s sister. The shades at their first-floor windows were drawn, which was a good sign. Walter and his sons were at work, and where was John Henry? Somewhere outside, clearing away storm debris.