Give Me Your Heart (21 page)

Barefoot and flat-footed, slightly short of breath, Lizabeta observed her silent husband across their bed: the man’s broad, muscled, faintly scarred back, which was very pale and going to
fat at the waist; his dark, thick-tufted hair, which was nonetheless thinning at the crown of his head. Walter was forty-three years old and had a foreman’s air of authority. In the Braam
household, as at the Sparta quarry, it was rare for him to be questioned. Lizabeta loved him, and was fearful of him. You did not love a man who didn’t inspire fear, though you might fear a
man—many men—whom you did not love. Walter was unpredictable in his moods. He was known to be a generous man, and yet he was quick-tempered, he could be cruel. As a father, he was a
strict disciplinarian; his sons respected him, resented him, and seemed, Lizabeta thought, to love him, though not wildly, as their little half-sister, Agnes, loved him. He never went to church yet
could not abide anyone speaking disparagingly of God, religion, as he could not abide profanity in the household and yet, when he became angry, he lashed out with the most obscene words Lizabeta
had ever heard, which frightened her, suggesting such violent disgust with the human body and with sex, which meant, as a wife must acknowledge, with
her.
Through the Rapids, Walter Braam
was admired as a loyal friend and neighbor, one who leased acres of farmland to other, poorer farmers for modest fees, yet Walter never forgave an enemy and maintained feuds with other men for
decades; his “oldest enemy,” as Walter called him, had been in Walter’s eighth-grade class at the Rapids school, at the time Walter had dropped out of school to work on his
father’s farm. Lizabeta had the idea that he disapproved of his sister Dorothy, yet how readily he’d taken in Dorothy’s castoff son, John Henry. Lizabeta thought,
He is a good
man—he can be strong enough for both of us.

Lizabeta had fallen in love with Walter Braam within minutes of his having noticed her: he’d smiled at her, not greedily or mockingly but in a kindly way, and called her Lizabeta. How
beautiful this name sounded in Walter Braam’s mouth! While in the mouths of other men the name had sounded clumsy, foolish. Lizabeta had worked in a Sparta rooming house as a chambermaid, but
she’d also worked in an adjoining tavern from time to time, and men who noticed her, who approached and spoke to her, hadn’t always been kind. Men who’d touched her, put their
hands on her, bought her drinks, told her how “good-looking” she was—how “sexy, like Jane Russell”—and laughed at her, hurt her and zipped up their trousers
afterward and walked away whistling. Sometimes the men had left tips for her, sometimes not. Sometimes they were friends of the man who owned the rooming house and the tavern, and sometimes not.
Then there was Walter Braam, who left tips for Lizabeta out of kindness. Asking her full name, which was Lizabeta Torvich, which no one knew, or cared to know. A widower, Walter Braam. An older man
with nearly grown sons and farm property out in the Rapids who worked in town, as foreman at the stone quarry.
God, let this man love me. God, let him want me. God, I will be a good person all
the days of my life, God, have mercy on me.
Lizabeta had not ever known why Walter Braam had singled her out for his attention, still less why, soon afterward, he’d asked her to marry
him; years later, after Lizabeta had had their first child, Agnes, while Lizabeta was pregnant with their second child, she would not have been astonished if he’d decided abruptly that he
didn’t want to be married to her any longer and told her to go away. (But would Lizabeta be allowed to take Agnes with her? Or would Walter insist upon keeping his daughter? In her fantasy of
self-abasement, Lizabeta hadn’t fully worked out the plot of this cruel fairy tale.) For the house on Braam Road was elderly Mrs. Braam’s house, after all, which Walter would inherit
when his mother died.

Lizabeta had come around the bed to touch Walter now, to hesitantly stroke his bare, muscled arm as you might stroke the neck, the rippling sides, of a horse, to placate the horse, that his
terrible bulk and strength would not turn against you. She’d annoyed him, she knew, by her questions. For there was the implication in such questions that Walter Braam might have acted rashly
and without regard for his family, which could not be so. For Walter Braam cared passionately about his family, and his manhood was bound up with this care and his pride in himself as the protector
of his family, Lizabeta knew, or should have known; yet her concern for Agnes and for the baby to be born—yes, and her concern for herself:
It
is yourself you are thinking of, John
Henry’s eyes on you—
had caused her to speak impulsively, recklessly. And so Lizabeta would placate her husband now, stroking his arm, laying the side of her head against his
shoulder, just lightly, as might a child who has roused a parent to anger half purposefully, to be forgiven. Lizabeta’s milk-heavy breasts swung loose inside the flannel nightgown;
she’d seen with a fascinated repulsion how swollen they’d become, how the once tight, taut little flesh-colored nipples had turned brown and widened to the size of half-dollars, and the
skin of her distended belly was a strange waxy white, stretched tight as the skin of a drum, and her pubic hair seemed to have become drier, and scratchier, and the soft marble-white flesh of her
thighs, which had grown heavier, rubbed together now in a damp slapping way that was perversely arousing and left her short of breath. In these early years of their life together, the sexual
feeling was still strong between them, despite Lizabeta’s pregnancies, but now Walter stiffened and pushed her away without looking at her, saying another time, for the final time,
“John Henry is living with us now.”

And so it was, and would be.

3.

He worked.

Eager to work as a work dog, restless and uneasy and doubtful of being loved when not working, saying, “What d’you want done?” in his anxious high-pitched voice.

“Aunt Liz’beta? Ma’am? What d’you want done?
O-kay!
”

O-kay
had the tone of a phrase of pop music, something breezy and cheery John Henry must have overheard on the radio.
O-kay
was one of John Henry’s numerous code sounds, which signaled yes, John Henry knew what such code sounds meant, just as you did.
O-kay!
was sometimes accompanied by a salute of John Henry’s right hand to the right side of his forehead, as he’d seen soldiers in uniform do.
O-kay, Aunt Liz’beta!

Watered and fed the barn animals. Mucked out their filthy stalls, cleared away filth and debris from their drinking pond at the center of the barnyard. Groomed the horses, milked the cows. Carried on animated if one-sided conversations with the horses, the cows, the barn cats, the lame mixed-breed Labrador. And the chickens. Gathered eggs each morning from the hens’ nests. Separated sick chickens from others not yet afflicted. Braved the roosters’ angry pecking at his hands, legs. Shoveled hay. Shoveled manure. In winter shoveled snow from the long driveway and from the paths. In spring yoked the horses to plow the half-acre garden behind the house. Helped his aunt Lizabeta, whom he adored in a puppy’s way of craven affection, to hoe, rake, seed, and water the garden and with the thinning of plants, weeding, and harvesting. Repaired the falling-down fences, for a farm’s fences are in continual need of repair. Hacked down tall grasses with a rusted scythe. Nailed tarpaper strips to the sheds’ roofs, amid the hammering talking and laughing to himself, for such work, the rhythm of such work, repetitions of such work, is deeply comforting. Heavy lifting, carrying. Clearing out the cellar after torrential rainstorms, leakage. Helping his aunt Lizabeta with housework, though Lizabeta was hesitant to put John Henry to work indoors for, oh! John Henry was clumsy with household things, “ladies’ things” John Henry called them—he dropped and broke plates, collided with furniture, became confused sorting cutlery into a drawer
(a task that little Agnes could do unfailingly), and skulked away deeply ashamed. And if John Henry volunteered to carry a stepladder indoors for his aunt to use while dusting the high corners of a
room, he was likely to ram the ladder against a doorway and gouge the wood; carrying a ladder upstairs, John Henry was likely to miss a step and fall backward, landing on his back, stunned and
breathless and the damned ladder on top of him, so Lizabeta had to stoop over him to help him scramble out from under it, frightened that poor John Henry had injured himself, guilty as if
she’d caused the accident herself. Oh, why didn’t John Henry go away somewhere and leave her alone? He made her so anxious. Except Lizabeta loved John Henry, of course, everyone had
come to love John Henry, who was so good-hearted, such a good worker, far more reliable and capable than, for instance, Walter’s sons Daniel and Calvin, so good with children, and children
loved John Henry, very young children especially. John Henry loved to observe the new baby, Alistair, being bathed, though he could not help with the bathing; John Henry loved to watch over Agnes
and Melinda outdoors and was happiest when called upon to rescue a child from a hornet, for instance, or from one of the angry red roosters rushing to peck at a child’s soft bare legs so the
girls squealed
Oh! oh! oh! John Hen’y, help!
and John Henry clapped and whistled and chased the bad rooster away. In the village of Rapids, where, usually on Fridays, Lizabeta shopped
for groceries and took the girls with her, there was a notorious black dog that stood in the road and barked and snarled menacingly, and John Henry had the power to calm this dog by talking to him
at length in a calm voice, explaining afterward that the dog was Big Fred he’d used to know and was a friend of his.

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.