Beaming Sonny Home (20 page)

“Sonny's dead,” Mattie said to no one. She thought about the strange twist of fate that had caught her up in its knot, caught up everyone she knew and loved. She had put all kinds of families back together, every day for over forty years, ever since Lester had started his nonstop cheating and her picture puzzle addiction had begun, out of sheer loneliness. She had put castles together. She had built massive bridges spanning huge, dangerous caverns. She had created flocks of birds, herds of wild horses, litters of kittens. She had constructed the leathery face of E.T., that ugly little extraterrestrial, as he stared out of a closet full of stuffed animals. And yet she couldn't do a single thing to pick up the Humpty-Dumpty pieces of her son's life and fit them all back together.

She reached a hand into her apron pocket and touched the eyeball piece, still safely tucked into the fold. It gave her a soft kind of comfort, just knowing that it was there. Maybe that's how Sonny felt the day he had hidden that brown piece of Judas's money bag from his sisters. Maybe he just needed to keep it a little while longer before it went off to complete the big picture.

“You need a nap, Mama,” Gracie said. She came and knelt before Mattie. Marlene appeared next, then Rita. Marlene reached out a hand and moved some of Mattie's hair away from her face. It was a loving gesture, one that rarely fell between Mattie and her girls. And so, for the first time that she could ever remember, Mattie cried in front of her daughters. Not even Lester's infidelity had prompted her to do such a thing. Instead, she had wept all her tears over Lester in private, thinking that the children needed a safe haven in which to grow up. It stunned the girls, that's what the crying did. They moved like quiet statues, whispering. Gracie hugged her first, and then Marlene came to offer a slack hug. Mannequins hugging. But Rita couldn't bring herself. She patted Mattie's hand, as though it were an interesting thing to find lying there on the table, next to her mother's arm. How had they become such stiff creatures, afraid of touching each other, afraid of unlocking the rusty doors to their feelings? How could mothers and daughters grow up and discover one day that they've nothing left to say to each other, that it's all been said before?

“Come on,” said Gracie, gently pulling Mattie up. Marlene found Mattie's favorite sweater and flung it about her shoulders. A sweater in the afternoon warmth! They led her down the tiny hallway of Lester's little blueprint of a house.

“I'll bring you some warm milk,” said Gracie. Warm milk in the heat of summer! But Mattie said nothing. Let them nurse her. Maybe it would do them good in some small way.

“Henry wants you to know that he's looking into the arrangements,” Rita whispered. “He says to tell you not to worry. He'll see to everything.” Mattie nodded. Dear Henry. A quick flash of relief settled upon her. Henry would handle the funeral. Sonny's send-off would be in good hands.

At the door to the bedroom, Mattie turned, looked at the three faces of her children, faces that had already begun to collect their own share of wrinkles, those little nicks of time, those little dents of life. And there was Rita's hair, turning gray, almost as gray as Mattie's.

“How old are you now?” Mattie asked her oldest child. Rita seemed surprised.

“Me, Mama?” she said. “I'm forty-five.”

“Forty-five,” said Mattie. She reached up and touched Rita's hair, put her fingers on the gray.

“Life ain't perfect,” Mattie said softly. The girls waited, respectfully. Now Mattie reached out and touched Marlene's face, touched the little mark beneath her eye where Sonny had hit her with a stick. A scar that needed three stitches. He was seven years old at the time, and it had been an accident. But Marlene never forgave her brother for it, Mattie knew. She had almost protected the scar, kept it as sure proof of how awful Sonny was. They had
all
collected scars, hadn't they? She, the girls, Sonny. But still, they had had so many years to heal, so many years. Funny, but Lester Gifford was the only one in the family paid for his scars, with that government check sent monthly to wounded veterans. Lester had been the family businessman, dealing in wounds and injuries. Broken hearts and crippled emotions. My God, but Rita, her firstborn child, was now forty-five years old. What had they done with time? How had they squandered it so?

“Mama, are you okay?” Gracie asked. She found Mattie's wrist and checked there for a pulse. This must be something else that they'd taught her in women's studies, how to find the pulse on a woman who's just lost a child to death. Well, good for Gracie. Good for whatever she might learn that could help her out in the world.

“Life's not perfect,” Mattie said now. “It's got cracks in it. And some folks, good people like Sonny, they fall into them cracks and they never seem to crawl out. And then one day someone comes along and fills up the cracks and them good souls are lost forever. I don't ask you to love him, but I do ask you to forgive him. For whatever you imagine he's done.”

“Try to sleep for a couple hours,” Rita said.

“We're taking the phone off the hook,” said Marlene.

“Do you want some aspirins?” asked Gracie.

***

For the first time since Monday, when Sonny had taken his hostages, Mattie slept well, slept the long afternoon, slept away the time of day that used to bring her the RH factor blues. Her dreams were good dreams, dreams in which immense gardens boasted row after row of superb vegetables, tall towering cornstalks, beds of shiny cucumbers so green as to appear unreal, long yellow beans hanging like the earrings Mattie had seen Robbie wear. And everything Mattie stooped to pull up was a color to behold: red radishes, orange carrots, yellow-white parsnips. A garden of colors. Like Mattie had always imagined the Garden of Eden to be. And then there was Sonny, leaning on a hoe the way Lester had leaned on it, in a lazy way, as if the hoe was not a tool for working, but invented for a good-looking man to just lean on.
“
Sonny,” Mattie said, and reached out a hand. It would be so good to touch him. It had been six months since she felt his arms around her at the kitchen stove, while she cooked him a boiled New England dinner, his favorite, and made him biscuits. Would any man ever again put his arms around her, now that Sonny was gone? “Sonny?” Mattie tried again, her tongue finally working in her mouth, her eyes straining hard. Sonny leaning on a garden hoe. What next? Now her dream feet were finally working, her dream feet were taking her places. She would get close to Sonny. She would tell him the best news of all. “I've got my teeth soaking, son,” that's what she'd say. But when her dream feet finally took her where she wanted to go, over all those rows of dazzling vegetables, she didn't like what she found when she got there. It wasn't Sonny Gifford leaning on a hoe after all. It was his father, Lester, looking every inch like his son. It was Lester Gifford, looking like a million bucks in his fresh army uniform, asking Mattie out for the very first time. “Run!” Mattie told her dream feet. “Tell him no!” she told her dream tongue. But her feet just kept on walking, and out of her mouth came the very first words she had ever said to Lester Gifford. “Ain't you got nothing better to do than lean on a hoe?” That's what she had said to him, on an August day in 1944, a year before she would marry him. And she had said those words simply because she didn't know, at that point in her trusting life, that Lester Gifford really
didn't
have anything better to do than lean on a hoe.

When Mattie finally rose from her bed, leaving Lester behind, hoeing in the Garden of Eden, it was nearly dark outside. She could see stars peppering the northeast sky beyond her window. Voices ran amok in the rest of the house, voices in the kitchen, voices in the living room, the sound of flushing in the bathroom. And voices from the blasted television, one of the family now.

“Our Heavenly Father,” Mattie said, her eyes on the black river beyond the row of wild rosebushes, which were now dark creeping shapes, crawling up the riverbank. Would He listen to her if she rang Him up? Or would He be engaged in one of those conference calls with Rita and Rachel Ann? “Dear Heavenly Father, please keep that boy safe in Your bosom. Forgive him for the mess he went and got himself into. Look into his heart, Lord, like me and so many other folks have done. Welcome him into Your arms. If nothing else, he'll bring a little gusto to paradise.” She moved away from the window then, moved slowly in the darkness toward the crack of light beneath her bedroom door.
Go
toward
the
light
. The truth was that her heart wasn't in the prayer she had just given. Her heart was lagging way behind. What Mattie really wanted to say was “Beam him up, Scotty.
Please
, beam him up.”

In the living room, she met with Gracie first.

“Look who's awake, everybody!” Gracie announced. Mattie blinked at the faces before her, her eyes adjusting to the light, her ears accepting the noise.

“Did you have a nice nap?” Rita asked. “You want something to eat?” Mattie shook her head.

“Where's Henry?”

“He just left,” said Rita. “He'll be back soon. They're bringing Sonny home tomorrow. There had to be what's called an
inquest
first. Henry's been on the phone all afternoon.”

Mattie sat on the sofa in the living room and stared at the screen of the television. There were new faces now, all discussing Sonny. The words came at her and then flew past, her ears too full to accept any more
developments
, too uninterested now that Sonny was beyond earthly help.

“Uncle Sonny's famous,” Josh said to Mattie. He had been asleep when the shooting occurred but now he was animated, caught up in the exciting world of adults and their antics.

“Uncle Sonny never even had a gun,” said Lyle. “But they went ahead and shot him anyway. The policeman who done it said he was aiming at the dog.” He pointed his finger at Josh's head and fired it. Point-blank.

“Granny, do you think the town will put up a sign or something one day?” Steven asked. “You know, something like ‘Mattagash, Maine, Population 410, Home of Sonny Gifford'?” Laughter rocked the room, Mattie's girls finding this notion very amusing. Mattie didn't laugh, however. With Sonny looming so big on television for the past three days, Sonny with his unbalanced grin and his Great Americans list, an underachiever whom the whole country had fallen in love with, considering all that, it seemed like a small thing if the town was to put up a sign.

“I, for one, think he deserves a sign,” said Robbie. She was sitting in the recliner, her legs swept up under her. Her little porcelain face was whiter than ever. Of course. Robbie loved her uncle Sonny with all her heart. Mattie had forgotten all about her, so caught up had she been with her own grief.

“Oh, Robbie, listen at you,” said Rita. “Sonny's still the apple of your eye, ain't he? I don't want to speak ill of the dead or anything, but Sonny took hostages. Yet people like you see that apple while some of us see the worm.”

“That's because people like me know how to look for the good,” said Robbie, defiant, her eyes teary. “People
like
you
are too busy speaking to God.” Rita gasped.

“Roberta, that'll be enough!” Gracie shouted from the kitchen.
Thank
you, Robbie
. Mattie realized that she was still tired. Had it been only three days before that life was going on as usual, that Sonny was off somewhere in the world, marrying a woman he barely knew and being generally kind to spiders and old people? Was it just yesterday, for crying out loud, that most of the United States of America didn't know that she, Mattie Gifford, was alive on the planet, that she'd borne a nine-pound, seven-ounce baby boy who would grow up to die on television?

“The whole country is saying good things about him,” Robbie added angrily, but Rita had gone back to the kitchen. Robbie got up and stomped into the bathroom, slammed the door. Mattie noticed some dead leaves on her geranium, sere, ugly things. But she couldn't find the strength to reach out and pick them off. They would fall on their own soon, would churn themselves into fertilizer. She tried not to think of Sonny's cold body lying in some morgue in Bangor, waiting to enrich the earth back in Mattagash, Maine. Mattie had already decided to give Sonny her own plot in the Mattagash Catholic graveyard, the one next to Lester. It didn't matter that Sonny wasn't a Catholic. Neither was Mattie. Lester was the only one in the family who was supposed to be Catholic, even though a minister had married him and Mattie. She would give the boy
her
plot. It would be the first time that Sonny and his father ever got together without shouting at each other. She would give Sonny her piece of the American pie. But she wouldn't tell the girls just yet. They'd be all up in the air, saying she was still favoring Sonny, giving
him
her plot instead of one of them. But how could Mattie tell them the things that she'd never forget? Things about Sonny Gifford that only a mother could know? How could she say to them,
His
hands
were
always
like
ice, even in the heat of summer, and he had a cowlick with a mind of its own. And sometimes, in the dark of night, when no one could hear him but me, he'd cry out, like he was fighting some silent war in his head. And when I'd come into his bedroom, he'd reach out and grab me like I was a piece of driftwood and he was a drowning boy. He done this the last time I saw him, girls. He done this as a grown man, reaching out for his mama, crying like some little baby. He brought me blue flag irises, many times, from the back swamp, and they stunk to the high heavens. But they were so pretty to look at that I kept them in a milk bottle up on the kitchen window, where the sun could hit them and make them blue as velvet, so pretty that the smell didn't matter.

Mattie put the cup of coffee Rita had given her down on the end table by the sofa. It was suddenly too heavy to hold, just like her motherly heart was too heavy. Just like Sonny's terror, whatever it was, was too heavy. She remembered again how limp his child-body felt, limp as a rag, all those nights he'd clung to her in terror. She had let him breast-feed until he was three years old, let him breast-feed while the girls were at school and wouldn't see. What would they say about
that?
She had given him five dollars once, when it was all she had in her pocketbook. So help her God, she'd given it to him so he could buy his own picture puzzle, a moonlighty scene with water fountains full of lilies, and pretty weeping willows hanging all over the place, and a whole parcel of rich folks walking around the lawn, the women wearing ghostly blue-white dresses, the men all smoking cigars. Mattie even remembered the name of it—
An
Evening
on
the
Plantation
—she remembered it, and she had given Sonny the money to buy it because it looked like a life he might have wished to live, if he hadn't been born to her, to Lester Gifford, if he hadn't been born in Mattagash, Maine. She had given him the money in hopes that he would cry out a little less in the dark of night. But now she knew she'd been wrong. This was what she would never tell her daughters. She was wrong. She had spoiled him too much. She should maybe have taken a stick now and then and beat him into the reality of what his life was, so that he could settle down to it, bruised maybe, like his sisters were, but at least
able
to
live
. She would never tell her daughters this, would never give them the pleasure. It would be her last legacy to Sonny, just like that five dollars had been a legacy.

And now, sitting on the sofa, her mind swirling with these thoughts, Mattie realized what her grandsons Steven and Josh had been so interested in, perched in front of the TV as they were. They were replaying the VHS tape of Sonny being shot in a spray of blood and bone, Sonny going down on both knees, his arms rising up in genuine surprise. Humphrey, the dog, arriving at his master's side, licking at the blood spilling out of Sonny's wound. The women hostages being pulled away. Sonny being carried to the ambulance on a stretcher, one arm dangling lifeless from beneath a white sheet. Mattie sat frozen, unable to turn her head away, and watched the replay of Sonny's last stand: Sonny being carried over and over again, his arm going back up inside the sheet each time Steven rewound the tape, with men taking him
off
the stretcher, Sonny getting up from his knees, the blood going back into his head, all the splatters disappearing back into the future, to the point where Mattie thought it might be a mistake, that Sonny's death could be undone,
rewound
. But then Steven would run the tape forward again, toward its future, and there would be Sonny fulfilling his death, Sonny being carried on a stretcher down from the trailer's front porch by men who were kinder to him than his own sisters, men who saw the good that Mattie and Robbie saw. And Mattie knew then, sitting before the VHS tape of Sonny's Hollywood debut, that for all the rest of her life, she would never listen to anyone say a crippling word about her crippled son. She would never admit to her girls, those big hateful girls, what she knew to be the truth. She would never say,
Listen, you bitches, maybe your brother wasn't a go-getter. But I know this much. Sonny Gifford was like them blue irises that grow down in the swamp. Once you learn to forget the shortcomings, you can concentrate instead on what's pretty.
She would never say this to her daughters.

Mattie turned her head away from the flickering images on the screen. Rita and Marlene and Gracie were now filing into the living room, carrying plates of food.

“Oh, Jesus!” Marlene shouted. “Look what them kids are playing!” She grabbed Steven by the neck.

“Turn that off right now!” Gracie ordered.

“Leave him alone,” Mattie said. “He didn't mean nothing by it.” Gracie should know that kids these days can't tell the real thing from television. They should be teaching things like that in women's studies courses. But Gracie and Rita had already forgotten about the little mishap, for they were passing out sandwiches. The phone rang. Both Rita and Marlene rushed to answer it.

Mattie stood, her legs wavy beneath her. She stepped over Josh and then Steven. At the sofa she knelt down and patted a hand about on the floor until she touched the sheet of cardboard that held
Easter
Rising
. She slid it out from its hiding place and looked down at Jesus with his one pitiful eye.

“Oh, honey,” Mattie whispered. “Oh, sweetie.” She placed one finger into the gaping hole and then rubbed as gently as she could, caressing the empty socket, the way she wished she could place her fingers into the bullet hole in Sonny's head, could stop that awful gush of bright red blood. She thought of Irwin Fennelson's missing eye, the one he left in Vietnam in 1969, and she knew that God had had a hand in that, too. God even had something to do with the tree branch that had sprung up in front of that old Watertown man's eyeball, all those years ago. “I guess it was God's will,” Mattie remembered Martha Monihan saying when they had met the old man on the street one day. It wasn't that Mattie didn't believe in God. She did, she most surely did. She just didn't like some of the things He did, is all.

“Oh, you poor lost boy,” Mattie said to Jesus, “with no father there in your life to hold you.” She was whispering, afraid Rita would hear her and bring out that blasted Bible again. But it was true. It was what Jesus and Sonny had in common: While their mothers were standing in the background, wringing their hands and crying over milk that was bound to spill, where, pray tell, were the fathers, earthly
and
heavenly? Where were those deadbeat dads? And she would ask Rita this, if she must. But in the meantime, she had to take her share of the blame. She had to admit that maybe it would have been better to reach out and catch that glass of milk
before
it spilled. What good had it done Sonny that she had always been there, like a good motherly soul, like a good
woman,
to mop up the mess? What good had it done for Jesus to see Mary weeping and wailing in the distance, turning up at the Crucifixion while they gave him vinegar on that pitiful sponge at the end of a reed? There had been too many long reeds in the lives of some children, too many ten-foot poles between them and their parents. Yet little Bill Clinton had never even met his father. He had grown up with an abusive man, and yet he had become president of the most powerful country in the world. No, Mattie had to take her share of the blame, there was no doubt about it. Just as Mary needed to take her own blessed share.

She didn't have to worry about Rita giving lectures of a religious nature, however.

“Listen up! Listen up, everybody!” Rita was now bellowing. She had hung up the phone, her face flushed with excitement. “That was a producer from that TV show
Hard
Copy
, and he wants to talk to us. I told you all hell would break loose when someone found out Sonny has a family!”

“I can't go on TV looking like
this,”
Gracie said. “He ain't coming
tonight
, is he?”