Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (33 page)

“You ever done one before?”

He looked at me.

“All right,” I said. “Maybe I’ll have me another beer though, first.”

“Good idea. Grab me one, too.”

*   *   *

I like Chicago just fine. Sometimes, I ride the El with our girl, Christina, just to get out of the apartment. She’s an angel. I think she likes the train. People come over, peek into her little bassinet. We can ride all day if we want to, and sometimes we do. I stare out at the big buildings, and already I can pick out the Sears Tower or whatever the hell they call it now. And the John Hancock, where I guess Kip used to live. We ride past Wrigley Field and go up all the way to Evanston, then all the way back down, way south, past Comiskey and Chinatown, to where the city begins to level off.

And nobody looks twice at me. And nobody tells me what to do, or what not to do. And when I get lost, I just ask for help, and having a little baby in my arms always seems to help too.

B

W
HEN WE WERE JUST TEENAGERS
, Henry brought me to the top of the feed mill. It was a summer night without any breeze and I snuck out of the house after my parents had gone to sleep. We walked downtown, holding hands, and anyone might have seen us, except that no one was out, no one was watching, just one old widower, sitting on his front porch swing, swinging, and he waved at us through the darkness.

Up on top of those silos, there
was
a breeze, and far off over the countryside, lightning connecting heaven to earth. We took our shoes off, let our feet dangle. We kissed, and I was aware that my upper lip was sweaty, but Henry didn’t seem to care. He touched my ears, my neck. He told me he loved me. An eighteen-year-old Henry.

It’s all been worth it. Every fight, all those years of childish experimentation, the occasional heartbreak, the paltry checking account, the used, old trucks. To have lived with another human being, another person, this man, as long as I have, and to see him change and grow. To see him become more decent and more patient, stronger and more competent—to see how he loves our children—how he wrestles with them on the floor and kisses them unabashedly in public. To hear his voice in the evening, reading books to them, or explaining to them what his father was like while he was alive, or what I was like as a girl, a teenager, a young woman. To hear him explain why our part of the world is so special. To hear him pray for trees and for dirt and for rain and for those people in the world less fortunate than us. To hear his voice in church, singing. To hear him urge our children to protect those kids at their school who others bully. To see him stop our truck in the middle of the road to carry a snapping turtle off the asphalt and into a nearby pond. To watch him on our tractors, in the last orange light of day.

*   *   *

When Eleanore was born, I ruptured my uterus. The amount of blood was horrific, but the doctor said that everything was normal, that it was just a tear. But Henry was adamant that something was wrong, and that if the doctor didn’t do something
right that fucking second
Henry was going to break the man’s jaw. Two male nurses were called in to subdue him, and even I said, “Henry, it’s
fine,
as long as the baby is healthy,
please
don’t worry. Just go on into the hallway and get yourself a glass of water.”

I remember the doctor, clear as day, saying, “Listen to your wife, mister. Listen to your wife before I have to call the police.”

Most men, most
people,
in that situation, would have backed off, would have submitted to the doctor’s authority, to the two nurses clutching his biceps, to the calmness of my voice. Henry didn’t.

He said in a tone of voice I can still recall, “Doctor, something is wrong with my wife, and if you don’t fix it right now, I won’t
sue
you, I will break every
bone
in your body.”

It was a nurse, an old woman, who took a closer look, who noticed the extent of the bleed, saw my face going sallow, took charge of the room, called the doctor back to work. They stopped the bleed, and maybe they would have found it without Henry, but what I know is that I would have lost much more blood if he hadn’t spoken up, that the situation would only have become more difficult, and that he was right all along.

Days later, back at home, lying in bed nursing Eleanore, I asked him, “How’d you know something was wrong? I didn’t even really know. Just thought I’d torn some stomach muscles or ripped something down there. How did
you
know?”

He was there, too, right beside us, and said, “I don’t know. I guess I just
knew
. It didn’t seem right.”

What he could have said is,
I know you better than you know yourself
.

And this, I think, is what marriage is all about.

L

T
HE DAY
B
ETH AND
H
ENRY
were married was like this:

Low-slung clouds to scrape the yielding earth, the streams and rivers swollen and dirty, green and yellow tractors in the fields doing their discing. Vs of wild geese in the gray woolen sky, flying their ancient and yearly sorties, red-tailed hawks on telephone poles scoping voles and field mice, cows lazing in the mud, and a tire fire miles off, smudging a spot of sky.

A Lutheran church alone on its parcel of prairie, a humble parking lot newly asphalted and partitioned in yellow paint. A line of arborvitae to break the wind, another line of white pine for shade. The cemetery: one hundred and ninety-nine headstones, one dating back to 1877.
BJORN ERICKSON
still legible though the engraving had been softened by acid rain, by lichen, by western winds, by ice and snow. A swing set, the chains rusty in places and protesting loudly even against gentle breezes. The bell tower—taller than anything for miles but two or three corn silos and one cottonwood tree down by the irrigation ditch.

Inside the church those in attendance sat in their oak pews: fingering the paper programs, thumbing the Bible, playing tic-tac-toe, loosening their ties already, adjusting pantyhose, blowing noses, murmuring gossip, adjusting hearing aids, repeating gossip.… In the balcony, a widow began playing the church’s gassy old organ, and everyone rose loudly. The processional music was meant of course to be a march, but the widow played it like a dirge.

We were badly hungover, our nerve endings frayed, our skin jumpy, our pores leaking the day-after poison of too many shots and beers. Our mothers scowled at us through tears they had no intentions of shedding, our fathers groggy and oblivious. Even for springtime, the church felt overly warm, everyone fanning themselves with the programs. I glanced across the aisle at one of the bridesmaids, who sported a unicorn tattoo on her right shoulder. The bridesmaid just next to her, for her part, a giant black butterfly of a breastplate tattoo. Both creatures seemed to me to be genuinely
in motion,
enough so that I began to feel nauseous and above my shoes I know that I must have been swaying back and forth ever so gently, like a very green fern in the wind. We waited for Beth to appear.

Maybe it’s telling that Henry never chose me as his best man, opting instead for his younger brother Simon, who at the time of Henry’s wedding had not yet graduated from high school. Simon was the right choice of course; family comes first, and had Henry known some of the thoughts fluttering around my brain, or the emotions percolating in my heart as I stood up there with him at the front of Trinity Lutheran Church, he wouldn’t have invited me at all, and he certainly wouldn’t have chosen me as a groomsman.

*   *   *

We had misbehaved the night before—no tomfoolery, just
serious
drinking at the VFW following which at two
A
.
M
., we lugged two cases of warm beer up to the top of the feed mill and sat there, drinking and laughing.

Melancholy
is such a dramatic sounding word, but sometimes it’s the right one. When you’re feeling both a little happy and a little sad; it’s the feeling that most people experience at a high school graduation I suppose, or watching their child board a school bus for the first time. The night before Henry and Beth’s wedding, that’s exactly what I felt—
melancholy
. Every time I allowed myself to loosen up at all, have some fun, I’d come back to thoughts of Beth and that night we had together—about how she was the only one I’d reached out to, and why was that? Why her? Why her, and not Ronny or Henry, or even Eddy? Did she think about me as well, and had she ever loved me?

A freight train came roaring through the night and I sat watching it, wondering where it was going. That first album,
Shotgun Lovesongs,
had just been released by a small record company, and it was beginning to sell better than anyone had expected (a few hundred copies every week). I wasn’t really getting paid yet, but reporters were calling. Those were the days I welcomed interviews, welcomed any chance to talk about that album, about the chicken coop and Wisconsin, winter and being lovesick.

Ronny threw our empty bottles down at the train as he danced around. He had just come back from the road with a black eye and a tooth missing, souvenirs of a particularly nasty bull in Cody, Wyoming.

“You nervous?” I asked Henry, raising my voice to carry over the train.

He shrugged, leaned in close to my ear. “I don’t know, a little bit, maybe,” he said. “And at the same time, it feels like a long time coming, you know? I guess I’m just a little nervous about the ceremony, about saying the wrong thing or fainting up there or something stupid.”

“You’ll do fine,” Ronny said, waving Henry’s worries away like so many horseflies.

“You’re a lucky man,” I said.

“I know.”

“Beth is … she’s incredible. I’m just so happy for you two.” I sipped at my beer, was glad for the darkness, that Henry could not see my face.

“Thanks.” Then, “You okay, Lee? You seem a little, I don’t know, out of it tonight.”

The train finally passed,
Ca-clink-ca-clink, ca-clink-ca-clink,
then its whistle, that sweet midnight jazz, all horns and rhythm …
ca-clink-ca-clink, ca-clink-ca-clink
 …

“No—listen—I’m fine, buddy, I’m fine.”

“Well.” Henry patted me on the back, drank the dregs of his beer, then stood, said, “I think I have to call it a night. Big day tomorrow.” He held out his hand for me to shake, and after I transferred my bottle into my left hand, I did.

“Really? You’re packing it in? It’s
early
.”

“Lee, it’s three o’clock in the fuckin’ morning. You should go to bed too.”

“Whatever, Dad. Dawn’s in, like, two hours. Come on. Let’s catch the sunrise here, like old times.”

Henry just chuckled, gave a friendly wave, and then climbed down the rebar stairs of the mill, disappearing down the side of the building, followed soon after by Eddy, the Girouxs, and then Kip, until at last it was just me and Ronny, the way it always was, and we sat, facing east, drinking the remaining beers, each one warming up, taking our turns to stand and pee off the side of those towers—
a cheap thrill
—until the horizon began to soften into blurry shapes and a progressively lighter shade of blue.

“It’s coming,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” said Ronny. “Blasé. Gonna be lackluster, I can tell. I predict rain.”

“Did you just say
blasé
?”

He nodded. “French for
not much to see
. I know a few things, asshole.”

We waited for the morning colors to blossom, but they never really did. Finally, we gave up and climbed down, exhausted and drunk, and slunk toward Ronny’s parents’ house, where Ronny collapsed into his childhood bed and I fell onto the floor. Later, Mrs. Taylor must have covered me with a blanket and, at noon, she carried two coffee cups into the room, opened the curtains, and said crossly, “You two are too old for this, you know. You’re grown men. Christ, Lee, get ready. The wedding’s in a few hours.” She kicked at me, lightly, with the pink toe of her plush slippers.

*   *   *

The organ suddenly quieted and everyone who had been staring at us in the front of the church now turned to look behind them, where Beth now stood next to her father. She was beautiful. More beautiful than I could ever remember, and I had known her as long as anyone, since back when we were in kindergarten and Beth wanted to be a veterinarian. I swallowed so hard my throat ached.

And then the organ resumed, louder than ever, the old widow really
giving it
now, and Beth came forward, slowly, languidly, as if skating. The whole church must have been marveling at her just as I was: the muscles of her arms, the moles on her shoulders, the veins and sinew of her throat, her white teeth, damp eyes, the helixes of brown hair, Revlon red lips. Never, not in the whole history of Little Wing, Wisconsin, could a woman have looked as beautiful as Beth did at that moment. Just watching her march toward us was enough to sober me up, cause me to stand up a little straighter. I watched the men in the church attendance as she walked past them, watched some of them lower their faces to examine the slate paving and smoothed-out old grout of the church’s floor; she was almost too pretty to look at. The last thing I remember in much detail was the bald Lutheran minister saying some words that relaxed the parishioners back into their pews and directed those of us at the front of the church to alter our positions and face the groom, bride, and pastor. I swiveled carefully on drunken heels.

I didn’t register much of the ceremony. The soloists were ho-hum, the readers read familiar passages, the pastor moved into a monologue about the importance of family, the gift of children, the bounty of the land. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, imagined Beth laying on top of me in bed, her lips, her long hair shrouding me, all fragrant, her bright eyes hidden behind mascaraed eyelids.
Shit,
I thought,
you have to stop
.