“I sure do like this car!” Irving shouts out.
Delphine says, “Sir’s got a business dealing for you. It sounds real good—”
But Sir Lee cuts her off. “Shut up and let the man do the talking.”
Delphine shoots smoke out over her head, exasperated. Sir Lee pulls out a piece of paper and starts to look it over as if he’s reading it.
“They’ve got trunkloads down in Florida, and you can buy a trunk. Cheap.”
Alma doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Henry says, “What’s inside these trunks?” He stuffs his hands in his pockets. It’s an old habit that Alma recognizes, a self-restraint, as if he’d reach out and grab the paper if he weren’t held back.
Sir Lee leans his head forward, over the wide girth of his belly. “Hard to say, exactly. By law they’re selling it to you sealed, but it’s unclaimed goods from a ship of rich folks. Jewels, most likely, precious heirlooms. Now I’m not telling this to everybody. But how do you think I could afford to buy that fine automobile you see before you?” He hands Henry the paper, and Alma catches a glimpse of a detailed map, a thick paragraph of wording. Henry looks it over.
Lettie pipes up. “Where’s Florida?”
Sir Lee bends, trying to fold the deep chords of fat. “It’s a magical land far away with mermaids and root-beer rivers.” Alma can barely stand Sir Lee so close to her daughter, his hot breath in her face. “You all should go and get you a trunk.”
“Do you have to go there yourself?” Alma asks. “Or can you just send for one, by post?”
“Oh no, you have to go yourself. The post is too risky. You need to go and ask for Jake. It’s an inside job, see?”
And there is a shift in Alma. She recognizes the moment. Sir Lee swaying in the yard, the lilting slips on the line, the boys rounding the car. Dark settling. She is suspicious of the trunk, of a man named Jake, the inside job, everything that slides from Sir Lee’s mouth, but she can’t help but sense the momentum of change, a turn in the current. We’ll have to go and get it. All the way to Florida. She has never been anywhere. Not anywhere. Her heart pounds loud and fast. It throbs in her ears.
“I would like to go there,” Lettie says.
“I’d like to have a car like this one!” Irving shouts out.
“Well, if your daddy plays the hand that’s dealt him.” Sir Lee pulls the corners of his mouth back into an expression that’s more grimace than smile. His eyes flash like darting minnows.
“Thanks for telling me about it, Sir Lee. I sure do appreciate that.”
Sir Lee holds out his hand, and Henry shakes it. Sir Lee holds it out again. “For the liquor,” he says.
Henry is embarrassed. Sir Lee always flusters him. He pulls out the bills Alma gave him; before handing them over, he smooths them on his thigh because they’ve been clenched in his fist.
“If you need a little loan,” Sir Lee says in a low voice, rocking in, “for the trip down and the trunk, you let me know. I’ll give you enough to tide you over. Low interest, because I consider you a good friend. You’ve got good sense, Henry. You know a deal when you see it. You got a real head for business.” Sir Lee rocks back to the car, goosing Netty on the way. She squeals, but it’s perfunctory. “When you go down, ask for Jake. And get out of the railroad, once and for all.” Sir Lee hitches his pants before getting into the car. Delphine waves wearily, her hand white and wilted like a handkerchief. They pull out of the driveway and turn onto the road, lost from view by the tall hedgerow. And it’s a relief. Alma feels as if she’s been holding her breath. She turns to Henry.
“We can’t go to Florida,” she says. It’s a test.
He claps his hands together, rubs them. “And why can’t we?”
The slips flip up on the line. The breeze lifts Alma’s skirt, fills it up around her hips. She laughs and presses it down.
Just then the back door slaps shut, and there is Mr. Bucci, ringing his small hands, his wiry, acrobatic body now stiff and hunched, his head cocked to one side. “The Great Realdo is dead,” he says.
“Who’s dead?” Henry asks.
“The bear,” Mr. Bucci says. “My bear. The one who wore my top hat and could tap his feet in the show. He’s dead now.”
Lettie grabs her mother’s dress, her fists wringing the cloth at her hip. The little girl starts to cry. “I told you,” she says, as if it’s now Alma’s fault for not taking the girl more seriously and saving the bear’s life.
Willard runs to his mother. He grabs her, too, around her backside. The two children weigh her down. It gives her a small panic, as if she’s in water, about to drown. Willard cries, “Oh no—the bear is dead and gone to heaven!”
Irving says, “Quit. Bears don’t go to heaven.” He looks at Alma, too, daring her to contradict his practicality. Alma doesn’t. Lettie and Willard sag on her skirt. She loses her balance and takes a few quick weighted steps to right herself. She pats their heads. She says, “Shh, shh, hush now.” It’s what she’s supposed to say, isn’t it? Something gentle.
Nettie shifts her hips. “Well, how do you like that! I’ll send one of the chorus singers to town to cancel the show tonight. Can’t go on with a dead bear! I’m going to have me a drink.” And she sidles to the door.
“How the hell are we going to haul a bear out of the house?” Henry says, walking inside. “It’ll take four, five men.” Irving follows him, stiff-chested like a man himself.
Mr. Bucci shuffles in behind them, saying, “The Great Realdo is dead,” starting again, taking it from the top.
It’s dark now. The moon is low in the sky. It’s quiet, clouds clumping like piles of slag, heavy, gray, dolorous, but there is the unalterable promise of change like a high bell—not a gong, a high bell—one hundred bells, hand-rung, in a somber church. Her children are latched to her middle. “The bear is dead,” Alma says in a whisper. She thinks of its soft fur, its large body gone limp. And now it seems a good thing, a necessity, an ending so that the beginning can truly begin.
After dinner and the scrubbing of plates, everyone heads upstairs. Alma follows and stands in the doorway to Mr. Bucci’s room, watching the men for a few minutes. Mr. Bucci, woeful, a stammering hesitation to each movement. Wall-Eye, a narrow book of a man, too fearful to touch the bear. Mr. Eddie, already drunk from his toddies. Willard, strong enough but too unpredictable to help, liable to drop his end for no reason. Irving, eager but too wiry. She knows that it will be up to Henry, most of all, to haul it out. The room smells of fur and shit—although the bear had been trained to go outside, it hadn’t always made it—Mr. Bucci’s sweet cologne, his gas burner, and, too, the cloying sourness of his grief. Alma leaves them to their work.
Now, Lettie kneels between the soft webbing of Alma’s thin cotton nightgown stretched from knee to knee. Alma is brushing Lettie’s hair, fine and knotty with matted gummy spots she picks at with the combs first dense tooth. The little girl is trying not to cry, pinching snot from her nose, her head bobbing and snapping as Alma tugs. She hums “St. Louis Blues” to drown out the sounds of the men hauling the bear, but she can still make out the heavy body on the stairs, the fast thudding, the men calling out, “Whoa!” Mr. Bucci’s sharp gasp. The front door opens, and she can hear them working the bear across the wooden porch boards, not as smooth as the floor inside, and then the body hefted down the porch steps. Finally it’s quiet, and she knows that the men are having a sink drink in the kitchen and that maybe this will be one of those times that Henry lets the boys have a sip because they’ve acted manly in the face of adversity.
“Maybe now that the bear is dead, you won’t have your bad dreams,” Alma says.
“It isn’t the bear I dream of,” Lettie answers. “It’s always water and a hand coming out of the water and I’m standing on a dock, but I’m a grown girl. I’m scared of the hand. That’s what it is.”
The girl’s nappy hair is brushed through. “Well, maybe the bear was holding the bad dreams for you. Maybe now t
hat he’s gone, the dreams went with his breath, just like that.”
Lettie looks at her sadly. “It wasn’t the bear’s fault.”
And Alma doesn’t know what to say to that. There’s nothing to say, because her daughter’s cheeks have gone red again, and anything will make her cry now. Alma feels useless. It’s often how she feels with Lettie, who looks at her with such wanting, waiting for her to do something, to say something, and Alma has no idea what it is. She wants to ask her what it is she should do, because it seems sometimes that Lettie knows the answer somehow but refuses to tell her. Although perhaps what she needs most of all is the comfort that somebody might be in charge, even if it isn’t the truth. Sometimes Lettie glares at her with a look that seems to say, Don’t you know what you’re doing? Are you a mother at all? And Alma would like to confess that no, she’s still a daughter. She has no idea what she’s doing or how she got here.
“Go on to bed now,” Alma says, and Lettie scrapes her bottom lip with her top teeth, sniffs, and tromps out of the room.
Henry appears in the doorway, smiling. “The bear’s out of the house.” He’s sweaty, his sleeves rolled tightly above his elbows. “It’s a good thing to be rid of that bear, I tell you.”
Alma is brushing out her own hair now. She looks in the rippled mirror, rose-etched around its rounded trim. She is still a pretty woman: her full bowed mouth, her simple nose, her arched eyebrows and gusty hair, curlier with each pregnancy until now it nearly kinks around her face.
Henry shuts the door, pulls the straps of his overalls down, steps out of his boots. He sits on the weak bed, its coils sagging under his weight, the metal frame clanging against the wall. Outside, Wail-Eye is playing his bagpipes. His real name is something Scottish, although nobody ever calls him by it, and when he gets edgy Nettie offers him something to drink to calm his nerves. Then he gets boastful, talking about the old country, and soon the pipes come out. Tonight, no doubt it is the dead bear that has rattled him. Now Nettie is singing along. The two of them are out in the front yard. Drunk as she is, Nettie sounds as squeaky as the bagpipes. It’s a mix that makes Alma think of lusty cats.
Henry lets out a raked sigh, slams the window shut. She knows he hates the noise and has probably thought of shooting at Wall-Eye and Nettie like his daddy used to do with crows in the garden. He’d pick up a shotgun in the middle of dinner and shoot it out the open window, a blast to make the heart stop, the gun smoke filling up like a small cloud hovering around the table. Henry had taken his small cash inheritance and moved over a hundred miles away. He hasn’t got a gun.
“What if she won’t take the children?” Alma is talking about her mother, the trip to Florida. Her mother has become unpredictable, a square-jawed woman who doesn’t say much, and when she does, it’s mostly to stand her ground.
“I’m a man, now, Alma. It’s not like when I was a scared boy bowing and tipping my hat good day to her.”
Alma remembers Henry, scuffing his boots on the porch, so mud-caked that her mother made him take them off before stepping foot in the house, and this seemed like a humiliation. He unlaced them and then shuffled in, his gray socks with their yawning holes curled up above his toes. He was shorter without the boots, smaller all over, it seemed, embarrassed and unprotected.
They both lay down in the bed next to each other. Henry stretches out with his hands behind his head. His body is long and muscular. When she touches him—which sometimes she does still, sometimes they roll toward each other to the sagging center of the bed—there’s no give beneath his skin, just the hardness of his muscles. Not like her body, which has become a little wider, softer, her stomach stretched and scarred, doughy.
Alma says, “Nobody gives something away for nothing.”
“We’re gonna pay for it, Alma. I can borrow some money.”
“From Sir Lee?”
“Unless you got a better plan?”
Alma doesn’t say anything.
“Sir Lee’s been good to us,” he says. “We’ll have to give a little something extra when we pay him back, but we’ll be rich by then, so it won’t matter.”
“Do you think the trunks belonged to people now dead? Or is it stuff they just never picked up? Or stolen? He never did give a real answer.”
“Between this boardinghouse and the freight yard, we barely make enough to cook up food for these sorry people. Something else has got to come along for us.” There’s a ferocity in his voice.
She rolls away from him, her hip pitching up, nightgown gathering in the dip of her waist. She knows that she’ll go to Florida with him, but only because there isn’t something else. It’s just sweat and work. She wants to tell him that she gets to thinking about her life and she’s hungry. It makes her feel starved for something. And she has no say in going, not really. She is his wife, and Henry is the head of the household. Even more so now that the bear is dead; even the way Henry lies on the bed, sprawled, feet spread, elbows cocked, seems suddenly larger, broader. As if he’s trying on a new weight, a fierceness. He’s entrenched, an immovable force, and yet it’s a tenuous victory. He lifts his head at a creak on the stairs as if he’s afraid the bear has come back to life to reclaim his territory, to take up the menace of his pacing.
Alma listens to the low moan of pumped air beneath the high notes. She’s seen Wall-Eye play before, his eyes shut, and he’s almost handsome like that, his lips pursed, cheeks red. His face is in her mind so clearly, she feels like she could touch it. She loves Wall-Eye and Nettie and Henry and the bear and the children, Bucci, all of them, and they seem so pathetic, so sad, she’d like to wrap them in wax tissue like oranges sent from Florida displayed in the grocery window at Tersh’s Market.
“Just let me do the talking to your mother. And if she don’t take ’em, then we leave this place anyway. Give the children over to the Catholics, just temporary.”
“No,” Alma says, but she’s already thought of it. She’s already let her mind lead itself out to that possibility. She’s aware, at the edges, that she’s lying, that she could tell Henry not to go after the trunk. I was just his wife. I had no say in it … It’s the story she will tell herself when she thinks back on how she could have done it, how she could have left her children. The truth is she killed Henry’s dog. She has a certain power. The bear is dead, but it was only a show bear. She could resist this infiltration of Henry’s virility, his lording around, but she allows only a small no. A thin, gauzy protest. She lets Henry go on.
“Just Willard and Lettie. Irving’s old enough now. I was on my own by that age. The nuns’ll teach ’em to read.”
This time she only manages to shake her head. She imagines her children at this very moment. She can hear them rustling in the bathroom, where Irving is probably rubbing the dirty creases of Willard’s neck with a washrag, and Lettie is splashing her own cheeks with water. They’ll crawl onto their mattresses on the floor and sleep. What do they know of orphanages? What does she know, in fact? Very little. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad.
“I’ve never been anywhere, you know that? A few train stops up the line and a few down. My brother went all the way to Mexico. In Veracruz, he pulled bananas right off the trees and ate them.”
She could remind him that his brother got shot and died there, too, in Veracruz. She’d often thought of his brother. She’d met him, and he was fair with fine, wispy hair, the type of person who, when you hear is dead, it seems to suit him immediately. He hadn’t been surely tethered to earth, in retrospect, and now he seems perfectly cast for the role of tragedy. But she doesn’t say anything, because it’s Henry’s hopefulness that redeems him, that can possibly outweigh his burly show of toughness, the fact that he can will himself to believe that there will be something in the trunk to save them. It’s beautiful, she thinks, the way he can wear hope like a hat.
He says, “I know I should feel lucky. I could work in the glass mill. I could have to pour tin. I could be underground, get buried alive in a collapse or like that
cousin of mine, who got electrocuted.” A rail hoisted to the cousin’s shoulder tapped a live line and sent a current to the nail on his boot to the metal rail, and the man was pure electricity, his body a lit current. The other miners tried to resuscitate him, lifting his arms like boat oars, as they’d been shown, to open up his lungs and get his heart to beat again, but he was dead. He’d come to Marrowtown with Henry, both of them looking for work. But the railyard wouldn’t take his cousin because he couldn’t read. He was younger than Henry, and the guilt has stayed. “And take those people in Boston, twenty-one of them, who died when a tank car of molasses burst open just because it had gotten warm in January. Molasses poured from the tank in a black shining wave. It destroyed everything and pushed it into the river they’ve got there.” Henry used to talk to her like this. He used to give long speeches, a burst much like the molasses wave that erased elevated train tracks and toppled cars, a great surge of talk, his eyes shimmering, distant. But it’s become rare. They’ve both grown tired, stingy, unwilling. It reminds her of his dreaminess, his youthful desperation. Her own. “But I don’t feel lucky. I don’t.”
The bagpipes rise to a new fevered pitch, and Henry jumps out of bed. He charges to the window and throws it open. He leans his whole body out and shouts, “Wall-Eye, if you don’t stop playing that bagpipe, I’ll shove it so far up your ass, your farts’ll come out duck calls for the rest of your life!”
Henry turns back to the room. The bagpipes stop. Alma smiles at him, laughs a little. She loves his sudden bluster. He softens, just like that, to hear her laugh. He’s standing there in his underwear, with his hair wild, his chest bare. He reminds her of when they were just two children, how he took her sweetly in the cornfields behind her mothers house. She looks at him and wonders when the last time was that they really stopped to see each other. He swings his head low, shakes it slowly, smiling, embarrassed now by what he must look like. He turns back to the window, looks out again.