Glass Boys (33 page)

But Eli knew the doctor was wrong. Not about the cancer, but the point of origin. Without doubt, it had started on his tongue. All those words, all those things he needed to say, laying dormant inside that muscle for years. Festering. Finally emerging the only way possible. Craters that formed from the inside out. And still, he continued to swallow it all down. Instead of speaking, he pushed those words further into his body. “Do you want to know how long?” Doc had asked. Eli shook his head. “We'll do everything we can,” he continued. “We have the means to make you comfortable.”

And there it was. Just like that. One moment moving through a day like any other, taking care of business, hauling limp stalks from the earth, gathering muddy potatoes. The next moment, open face pressed up against the great abyss, straining to see, hands flailing through cold blackness, feeling nothing. That was where he was headed. Eli was certain. Pulsed through that tight ridged channel, no pink light this time. Born again into a wide open space. Pitch dark. Eternal emptiness. He sensed the icy breath already moving to encapsulate him, brushing against the tip of his nose. Not much longer.

He would be alone, he'd make sure of that. He wouldn't allow Angie to witness him fading away. And what with the woman he married? Up and gone. Once the boy was in the ground, she plucked her clothes from the drawers, handful of dollars from a slit in the mattress, and left with her sister. Papers arrived within the week, and at first Eli didn't understand. Copies of an application to dissolve ties between Mr. Fagan and Mrs. Glass. Then it struck him. In a final squirt of spite, she had stripped herself of his name.

Eli leaned his head back against the splintery wall. Any filament of brightness in the barn had withered, and night filled the entire space. Even though he had been a terrible husband, he had done what he could to protect her that afternoon. Keeping the truth to himself all these years. She never knew her son. The boy that he was, the man he became. And Eli had long ago realized her love for that boy was the only thing that held her together.

So, that's one good thing I done, he thought. He looked upwards, blinked. Wasn't it? One good thing?

Eli dropped his hat, put his head in his hands. So difficult now to keep reflection at bay. Hard work had kept his conscience clear all these years, but with muscles now like shriveled fibers, he could no longer settle his mind. He looked upwards again, into the endless darkness.

“I am a...” he spoke. Nothing more than a whisper, but the echo inside the box of his barn jolted him, made his spine straighten. “I am a farmer.” His tongue contorted to shape the sounds, and the words burned as they made their passage.

No, you is a puss. A bloody puss.

Gone soft, my son, gone soft.

Eli folded his fingers together, ignored the extra voices, did not resist when his mind stuck in a claw, dragged out long dormant memories.

So many afternoons during those summer months, the boy would disappear for hours at a time. Leaving Eli with irritable cows, or weed-riddled fields, or a leak in the roof of the barn, rain on the way. Eli went looking for him that one day, and the bend in the long grass was as good as any arrow showing him the boy's direction. Eli tramped through the woods, and found him perched by the stream. Stopping in the shadows, he watched the boy haul up a glass jar, hidden in the river. Waited as he opened it, and dumped all his filthy secrets out onto the grass.

He saw the boy rocking on his haunches before a stack of photos, putting Eli in mind of some sort of queer animal. Sucking on the skin of his bare knee. Before Eli stepped forward, he felt the very air change. Heavy now. As though weighted with something forbidden. Something ugly. He believed Lucifer was lingering around the boy, drawing circles through the air, and his heart knocked hard against his ribs as he rushed out from the brush.

Eli overtook the boy. Added ten years to his age when he saw the photographs. A child, a child, naked, sprawled on a wooden floor in some, leaning against a wooden wall in others. White under-grown flesh. Pillows of baby fat. Big wide smile. Teeth locked together with what Eli could only guess to be a mouthful of old brown candy. He even thought he knew the child's face. His face. For that was all he could stare at. The face. And as he stood there, stunned, the boy danced. Hopping from one foot to the other. Eyes glazed and shiny, like someone gone mad. His hands flapping. A flightless, frightened bird. He began rambling stupid stories. Nothing believable, as Eli knew, the devil had hold of his tongue.

His first instinct was to drown the boy. Without a second thought. Drown him in the stream. Be done with it. Hold his head under. Until he went limp. He reasoned it was no worse than scooping kittens into an old sheet, and tying them to the muffler of his truck. And for a long moment, he did. The boy gaped up at him from beneath the rippling surface, but the water wouldn't take him, wouldn't do its work. And while Eli hated that child, he feared him, too. He let him go. Let him breathe. Then, as the boy crumbled and sputtered on the grass, Eli jammed every photo into the jar, twisted the lid thinking one might escape. He never spoke a word, stomped out through those woods, jar locked in both hands. Sleeves of his shirt were wet from the stream, rest of it wet from his sweat.

In a rusting barrel, he burned every last one. Struck them with a fork that was handy. Eli was senseless with disgust and anger and some sort of queer deep unease. And he couldn't help but remember his long dead uncle. His father's brother who lived in the room below Eli's. Every evening, creeping upstairs, suffocating Eli with his weight. Drunk and fumbling. Sour reek from down there. Stench like rot in a barrel.
Say hello to my
pet, Elias.
Every night.
Say hello to my pet.
Here. Those smooth handfuls and handfuls. Turning him over. There was joy in being someone's favorite. Small, simple joy in that. Sweets under his damp pillow when he awoke. But that was a window long painted shut. Long painted shut. And Eli would not take a knife to it now. No. But it could have been him trapped in that jar. Could have been him.

Hands between his bony knees, Eli leaned forward into the darkness of his barn, and listened. For something. He could sense his thoughts were in the air above him, like a texture or a layer. Rough against his crown. And he wondered how such a disturbance could hover there so silently.

Eli slumped his back, snapped the sole of one boot with the sole of the other. Another claw, tugging, tugging, more memories of that summer afternoon. Roy Trench coming out of nowhere, grabbing his shoulders. Constable Trench right behind him. And then everything just clashed together. A thousand voices calling “timber” in Eli's head. He couldn't hear or see or think. And all he could really recall was the dimmest notion to cover it up. As much as he threw at his wife, hard as he was on her, something in him said she didn't deserve that. To see that. To know she birthed something spoiled. She was a mother, first, who loved her son.

Well, he could save her from the truth about that boy. Her own flesh. Flesh she wouldn't let go. And he hadn't meant to move his arm in the way he did. Hadn't meant to have such force behind it. Strength in his clenched jaw, riding right down through his hand. A strike. A push. A twist. Eli's hand covered with blood, and even after he'd washed, it hid in the cracks on his knuckles, grooves around his fingernails. Like stubborn dirt.

So many years, he had worked to confuse himself. Erase the sins of the boy. Must the actions of a youngster mark out the grown-up he becomes? And so, Eli allowed the boy to stay. Living under his roof. And, in his head, he changed Roy Trench into a scheming trespasser, who was bound to do his property harm. Though he never could quite trick his mind fully, and he'd never been able to forgive myself for stealing someone's life.

Of course, that wasn't the end of it. Eli understood things like that don't end. They settle deep in the dirt, instead, just waiting to be kicked up. And now, a lifetime later, when the circle closed, when the dog finally caught hold to his tail, what choice did he have? Those two boys in the room that night. Life pooling on the floor. What could he do? Should he let the runt who had infected everything pass away? Should he let the runt be and tend to the healthy stock?

Pain spiked through his drug-numbed flesh, but Eli spoke again. Slowly. “I am a farmer. And, may God punish me. May He punish me for all eternity. But there was never any question.”

He unclasped his hands, took several quick breaths through his nose. Waited. Hard rain tapped the window behind his left shoulder, and hand gripping the rough windowsill he hoisted himself up a few inches. He shifted the old curtain, glanced out across the backyard towards the empty house. And there, in the middle of the lawn, was a murky shape, as though a foreign stone had risen from the depths, settled there.

Eyes adjusted to the night, and when he looked up at the rafters of his barn he could just make out the cross of wood. He shook his head slightly. Eli knew who it was. He turned to look again. After watching for several minutes, he reached for the lantern, lifted the glass chimney, and, with a match, lit the blackened tip of the wick.

THE HEAVENS OPENED up and icy rain pelted down, striking Lewis's scalp, the last few strands of hair slithering back and forth. He didn't seek shelter, stayed next to the disintegrating barrel until he was soaked through and through, and his skin began to swell on his body. He never noticed the light bobbing across the backyard, until a glove and a glowing lantern appeared right in front of his face. Someone gripped him firmly underneath his arm, guided him to his feet.

“You got to go on,” Eli Fagan said to Lewis. No trace of anger in his voice, but no softness either.

“Yes.”

“Idn't doing no good to no one.”

“No.”

Eli lifted his lantern, and for just a moment, in the pitch blackness of that backyard, there was a radiance between the two of them. Reddened eye meeting reddened eye. And in that instant, Lewis felt nothing. The hatred he had cradled for so long was gone. In its place, a curious whisker of something else.

“Eli.”

“Don't.”

“But—”

“I wants to see your suffering no more than you wants to see mine.”

“You done something and I needs to—”

Wet blackness once again, Eli had blown out the light. Voice from somewhere beyond. “Get on. Take what you got. I only—” A pause, sound of boots squishing wet grass. “Oh, I only—”

Lewis took several steps, reached into the night, wanting to touch Eli's shoulder, wanting to grip the farmer's waxy coat. But Eli was gone, swallowed in darkness, and for a moment Lewis was disoriented, wondered if the old man had been there at all.

SHOULDERS HUNCHED, Eli shuffled across the backyard, didn't slow when the wind stole his hat, lifted his strings of hair. When he reached the back of the house, he turned to look, but the yard was empty. The stone gone.

He rested against the door frame. The handle of the lantern was cutting into his finger joints, and Eli leaned, dropped it onto the stoop. His teeth clacked against each other, but Eli didn't feel cold at all. Sweaters and trousers wet and heavy, but inside the dragging fabric his skin-draped skeleton felt lighter than it had in years. And he lifted his face in the dark rain. Opened his mouth, let the clean drops rinse across his tongue.

AS HE MADE his way home, the rain lightened, and the moon peeked out through a crack in the clouds, making the naked world shine. He walked up his driveway, towards the warmth of his trim house, past the logs Toby had been cutting a month ago. Lewis bent to throw a few errant junks of wood back to the group. He stared at the pile, at the saw, blade rusted, and tried to assure himself that tomorrow, he and Toby would work on that together. Finish cutting, stacking a neat row against the shed. He could hear Mrs. Verge, Peggy, in his head, her kind words. Tiny steps. That's all anyone can ask.

29

DECEMBER PASSED INTO January, without as much as the toot of a metallic horn. Toby didn't mind the quiet, and he spent many weekend afternoons in the woods, cutting down birch, hacking bare branches with his tomahawk. Sweating inside his coat, his sweater, often working in nothing more than a T-shirt. Sometimes, at noon, Angie would find him, bring him a thermos of something warm, and they'd sit in the tamped-down snow, talk for a while about nothing in particular. He couldn't look her in the eye, had asked her to stop coming, but she refused. Said, “I don't know who you think you'd be helping, but it's neither of us.” He wanted her to stop caring about him, but she told Toby she couldn't manage it. “Fine, then,” he said. “Give it some time, and you will.”

One afternoon, when he finished his work, he walked about, thumped heavy boughs with his fists, let thick layers of snow tumble down onto his head and the hood of his coat. He didn't turn towards home until the wet cold invaded every square inch of his young body. Pushing his legs through the foot of sticky snow, he wondered what it might be like to lie down and sleep. Would he dream of Angie? No, he knew he wouldn't. He wouldn't allow himself the comfort. If he dreamt at all, he'd dream of Melvin.

He walked into the kitchen, and there was Mrs. Verge, balancing on a chair, pinching runners from a spider plant. Fresh snowfall outside shot white light into the room, and Toby could see a yellow glow coming off her wide sides. He stood there, in dripping boots, jacket hanging open, damp scarf letting go, a bright blue puddle on the floor.

Mrs. Verge turned, jumped slightly, frame jiggling. “Oh my gosh, Tobias. You startled me. Near stopped my heart.”

Toby's mouth fell open just a shade, and he said, “What?”

“I said you near stopped my heart.”

Toby shook his head, “I never meant to, Mrs. Verge.”

“You never said nothing when you come in.”

“I never said nothing. No.”