The Lost Mother Read online

  So there it was. Mr. Wentworth had been banished. Thomas and Margaret were cut loose, free to do anything they wanted. Or nothing at all, which was the case for Thomas.

  Margaret had a new kitten, orange, white, and black. It was always sleeping on her lap, head on its double-toed paws. With nothing else to keep him occupied, Thomas spent most of his time outside, whittling or roaming through the barns. Yesterday, Otis, one of the workers, rolled an extra cigarette and offered it to him. At first he’d said no, fearing the trouble he’d be in if he did. But of course he wouldn’t be. No one would know. And if they did, no one around here cared. Without school or parents, he could do as he pleased. He inhaled so deeply that he choked. He couldn’t stop coughing. Tears ran down his cheeks.

  “You should’ve said it was your first smoke,” Otis chided, then coached him the rest of the way through. “Take in just a little at first, hold it, then breathe out slow and easy does it. Yessir, now you got it. Here. Here’s for later.” Thomas liked the feel of the cigarette and matches in his shirt pocket. The tobacco smell reminded him of his father. But he had no desire to smoke. Ever.

  Every morning Jesse-boy woke up, panting for breath and groaning with awful, stabbing pains in his chest. By ten o’clock the symptoms usually eased enough for him to be able to “play.” Dolls had been banned from his room. Mr. Farley had come upstairs unexpectedly yesterday and been startled by his son’s shrieky falsetto demanding to be taken “to the queen’s ball.” Tonight no one spoke at supper. Mrs. Farley’s hands shook and her pale lips quivered. She barely ate. Sulking, Jesse-boy picked at his food. Coaxed by his mother to at least eat his favorite, the mashed potatoes, he tried, then gagged. A windy darkness pressed at the windows like bad dreams peering in. Margaret’s eyes darted between Jesse-boy and her brother.

  “There, there,” Mrs. Farley said, rubbing the back of her son’s neck. He should just spit it out and then he’d feel better. She was sorry she’d made him try the potatoes. Would he like applesauce cake? Or custard? There was still some custard left. Jesse-boy wanted to go to his room. His father lifted him from the wheelchair and carried him up to bed. His mother hurried after them.

  “I want to go home. Please, Thomas,” Margaret whispered. Now that she had become so housebound her face was sickly pale. She was beginning to resemble Jesse-boy in pallor and nerves.

  “I know, but we can’t,” he whispered. She didn’t know their father was in jail. Gladys had made him promise not to tell her. Upstairs, a great commotion had begun. Jesse-boy shrieked in outrage. Mrs. Farley sobbed. And Mr. Farley shouted, “You’ll damn well do as I say! And that’s that!” Brother’s and sister’s eyes widened on each other; life just got stranger and stranger, the look said.

  With his napkin dangling from his collar, Mr. Farley strode back into the kitchen. He sat down and ate slowly, determinedly. Staring, he blinked with each hard swallow. He was in charge here, and there was supper to be eaten. Finally, he pushed his plate away. His anger was fading to sadness, as if he knew how hopeless it all was. No matter what he said or did, just plain hopeless. He glanced at their empty plates. “You finished?”

  “Yes,” Margaret whispered, and Thomas nodded. Yes, finished his and Margaret’s too. These last few weeks he couldn’t get enough to eat. He was always hungry.

  Mr. Farley looked at Thomas. “Go up and … play with him,” he added sourly.

  Eager to escape Farley’s gloom, Margaret jumped up too. Mr. Farley said she could go to her room. He wanted Thomas to do it, he said with a stiff nod that sent Margaret scurrying up the stairs.

  “Play boy games. Please,” Mr. Farley called so desolately that Thomas felt something hard and sharp give way in his chest.

  He turned back. “That tire was my father’s. The one he took. And the saw, that was his.”

  “He broke into my property,” Mr. Farley said grimly.

  “To get his own things back.” Thomas could barely swallow.

  “Do you really think I’m going to sit here at my own table and listen to your fresh mouth?”

  “No, sir! It’s just I don’t see how they could arrest my father for—”

  “What you don’t see is your father’s a thief.”

  “No! He’s—”

  “Shut up! And if you don’t, if you can’t, there’s the door. Go!” He pointed. His face twisted with pain as if trying not to cry.

  Upstairs, Jesse-boy lay curled with his back to Thomas. He was still sobbing. He hated his father, his mother, Mr. Wentworth, Thomas, Dr. Creel, the whole pissing, goddamn world. Thomas continued lining up the checkers. Like smoke, Jesse-boy’s sorrow filled the house. Everyone was hiding from it.

  “You want to be red or black?”

  “What I want is for you to get out of here!” Jesse-boy’s narrow body arched with his scream. “That’s what I want!”

  “It’s not my fault. I don’t want to be here neither.” Thomas’s eyes moved from the wretched boy to the cowboy pictures. The windows not only had curtains, but on them a design of crossed Indian peace pipes. He wondered if Jesse-boy had ever even noticed them. He sighed. “But we gotta play a game or do something. Your father said.”

  “I hate my father! I hate him so much!”

  “Yeah, well you can still play checkers or something.” Expecting it to go flying, he gripped the edge of the board. Mr. Farley’s words had numbed him. No one ever spoke badly of Henry Talcott. He was a good man, respected and admired.

  “If I play will you do me a favor?” Jesse-boy grunted, pulling himself up against the pillows.

  “Okay.” Thomas slid the board between them.

  “Black!” Jesse-boy moved his checker though they hadn’t chosen turns. “Will you do something if I ask you?”

  “I don’t know, what?”

  “You know the gun cabinet? Can you get me a rifle?”

  Thomas moved his checker. “Why?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “I don’t know, play cowboys?” He nodded toward the Saturday Evening Post pictures Mrs. Farley had framed. In some, text on the back page showed through.

  “No!” Jesse-boy scoffed. He moved.

  Thomas shrugged and made two quick jumps. “How’d you miss that?” He couldn’t hide his smile. “Your move.”

  “I’m gonna kill somebody, that’s why,” Jesse-boy whispered, finger on the checker.

  “Who? Who you gonna kill?” Thomas asked distractedly, eyes darting over the board.

  “Somebody.” Jesse-boy made another losing move.

  “Who?” Thomas jumped, seized the black checker.

  “My father.” He had Thomas’s full attention. Squinting, he raised one trembling arm, the other stiff, aiming his imaginary rifle. “I’m just gonna sit here and wait and the minute that door opens ‘psew-psew-psew,’” he whistled, jerking back with each shot.

  “What if it’s your mother?”

  “I know his boots, how they bang on the stairs.”

  “Why do you want to do that, shoot your father?”

  “Cuz he’s such a mean bastard, that’s why.” Jesse-boy pushed a checker, threatening Thomas’s. “And I don’t have any other choice.”

  “But you’d go to jail. And they’d hang you, that’s what they do. Same as Red Tully.”

  “Who’s Red Tully?”

  “He killed his brother and sister once and that’s what they did. He was only a kid and they hung him. They did!”

  “How old was he?”

  Thomas’s eyes flashed in appraisal. “Fifteen. Yeah, that’s what he was, all right. Fifteen. Just turned too.”

  “Red Tully; how come I never heard of him?”

  “My father told me about him. He said he never did anything wrong, well, not real bad as that anyway. Then this one day he just got mad at his little brother. His sister was there, so he shot ’em both, quick as that. Didn’t mean to neither, which was the sad part, cuz then it was too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

 
“To change his mind. To bring ’em back.”

  “But maybe he was glad. To finally be rid of them.”

  “No, because then he was real alone,” Thomas said, sliding his checker forward a square, then another, unnoticed by Jesse-boy. “No family. Nothing. My father said he was so happy to die he thanked everybody that was going to hang him.” Thomas moved again, but Jesse-boy wasn’t even looking.

  “What’d they call him Red for?”

  “His red hair, I guess. Your turn. Or maybe his temper. That’s why my father always says, ‘When you start seeing red, think of Red Tully.’”

  Jesse-boy leaned closer. “Want to see something? Something really secret?”

  “Sure.”

  Jesse-boy told him to get his box from under the bed. Thomas knelt down and dragged out the locked wooden box. Checkers scattered as Jesse-boy lifted one hip and took a key from his pocket. “Pretty good, huh?” He passed Thomas the drawings, one by one. They were pictures of naked ladies, faces crudely sketched, the features dashed with little interest or aptitude for the details of humanness. The breasts were like round balloons, with bright red nipples crayoned in.

  “What’s that?” He pointed, knowing the minute he did what the scribbled snarl was between the legs.

  “That’s where girls get laid,” Jesse-boy explained.

  Thomas didn’t let on, but he was confused. He’d seen dogs and cows going at it, but didn’t remember anything that looked like this.

  “You never seen a naked girl, have you?” Jesse-boy’s red-rimmed eyes gleamed with rawness.

  “One time I did. It was a picture. In a magazine I found.” The woman had had fancy underwear on.

  “Was it your father’s?” Jesse-boy leaned closer. “It was, wasn’t it?”

  “No! It was old Bibeau’s. Out in his barn. I found it.”

  “You ever see Margaret naked?”

  “No!” Though of course he had.

  Jesse-boy smiled in gleeful disbelief. “Yes, you have! You just don’t want to say.” He opened his pajama top. “She got any”—he touched his own nipple—“things here yet?”

  “No!” Thomas still held the picture.

  “How ’bout hair there? She got any—”

  “Shut up!”

  Just then a light tap, tap, tap came at the door. “Jesse-boy, it’s me, dear,” Mrs. Farley called apprehensively.

  “Wait! Don’t come in yet! We’re not done playing!” Jesse-boy tossed the papers into the box, then locked it. “Put it back!” he hissed.

  As Thomas leaned over and slid the box under the bed the cigarette fell from his pocket. He picked it up and Jesse-boy snatched it from him.

  “You smoke?” he asked with awe as he slipped it inside the pillowcase.

  “Yeah. Sometimes.”

  “Give me a match.”

  Thomas lied and said he didn’t have any. Jesse-boy said there were some in the tin can over the kitchen stove. Mrs. Farley tapped on the door and asked if they were through yet. They were, Jesse-boy called back.

  “Oh, checkers,” she said, beaming as she backed in with her tray. There were two tall glasses of chocolate milk and two plates of applesauce cake with hard sauce. “Who won?” she asked, delighted that her son finally had a playmate.

  “Thomas. But he cheated,” Jesse-boy said. He broke off a forkful of cake.

  “Thomas wouldn’t cheat, Jess. He probably just doesn’t know the rules the way you do.” She glanced Thomas’s way, then fixed her loving gaze on her son. “Jesse-boy and I’ve been playing since he was just a little tiny boy.”

  “I don’t feel too hungry,” Thomas said, making his way to the door. As much as he wanted that cake and milk, he wanted more to get out of here, away from the stifling heat of this invisibly webbed room, away from this peculiar mother, whose lips moved now in perfect cadence with her son’s.

  “Don’t forget, you’re gonna get that for me, right?” they both seemed to be saying in Jesse-boy’s voice.

  Thomas nodded, opened the door.

  “Oh! Get what?” Mrs. Farley asked with shivery delight. Their voices trailed him down the hall.

  “A book I want.”

  “What book?”

  “I don’t have to tell you everything, do I?”

  “Well, no dear, I just wondered. I—”

  “See! That’s what I mean. I can’t have secrets. I can’t have friends, I can’t have anything of my own! Ever!”

  “No! That’s not true, dear, you—”

  “You spy on me! Can’t you leave me alone? Why did you have to come up here and ruin our game? You ruin everything! You always do!”

  “Jesse-boy! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!”

  Mrs. Farley burst into Thomas’s room and ordered him to go back and play with Jesse-boy. Had he gotten the match, Jesse-boy asked the minute his door closed. Yes, here; Thomas gave him the match and then started to leave. No! Jesse-boy hollered. First he had to show him how to smoke. Thomas lied and said Margaret was waiting for him to say good-night. It was easy, all he had to do was light it.

  “Please,” Jesse-boy begged. “You have to. What if I drop the match and I can’t get it, and then the whole house burns down?”

  Thomas hurried back to show him. “The first thing you gotta do’s tamp it. Here. Like this.” He tapped one end on the night table the way Otis had on the step.

  “Why?” Jesse-boy giggled with excitement.

  Thomas said he didn’t know; you were just supposed to, that’s all. But what was the reason, Jesse-boy persisted. To make it taste better? There wasn’t any reason, you just do it, Thomas said with a worldly shrug. Jesse-boy put the cigarette in his mouth. Thomas struck the match on the floor grate and then held the flame to the cigarette. “Do this,” he instructed, curling his lips and sucking in air.

  Jesse-boy tried, but opened his mouth too wide. The cigarette fell, smudging the sheet with ash from the burned-out paper.

  “Like this.” Thomas demonstrated with the unlit cigarette. “Like sipping in air.”

  Jesse-boy snatched it and put it in his own mouth. Thomas struck another match and tried, but the cigarette wouldn’t light. It was getting limp. Jesse-boy thrust the cigarette at Thomas and told him to light it for him.

  “Your spit’s on it!” Thomas cried with the wet end in his mouth. He struck another match. The cigarette flared red and lit with Thomas coughing out the smoke. His eyes watered and his nose ran. “Here. I took too much in. Just take a little.” He passed it to Jesse-boy.

  Jesse-boy puffed in then stared back with swollen cheeks.

  “Blow it out!” Thomas said, and Jesse-boy did. “That was good. You didn’t even cough.” Thomas sat on the edge of the bed.

  Jesse-boy smiled. He took another puff, again blew the smoke out easily. Pleased with himself he immediately took another, this time inhaling deeply. He began to choke, deep chest-wrenching gasps. With the cigarette still in his hand he bent over gasping for air. “I can’t breathe!” he finally wheezed.

  The door opened and the blue haze swayed overhead.

  “What’s going—Jesse-boy!” Mrs. Farley screamed, running to him. She began to pound his back. “Breathe! Breathe!” she cried, but he had gone limp. “Fred! Fred! Fred!” she screamed, arms around her gasping son.

  It was then that Thomas noticed the smoldering black circle widening on the bed. He grabbed the glass of chocolate milk and poured it onto the burning blanket. Mr. Farley ran into the room, half ready for bed. He was bare-chested in his undershorts with just one sock on. He swooped up Jesse-boy and swayed him in his arms like a baby, all the while shouting his son’s name. Jesse-boy’s legs swung like useless puppet sticks in the thick green wool socks Mrs. Farley had knit for him. “There, there,” Mr. Farley soothed while his wife tore about the room begging God to spare her son and take her. Because if He didn’t, she threatened, she’d kill herself. That’s what she’d do. She’d have to! Without Jesse-boy she had nothing to live for. Her life was over.
r />   Thomas watched warily for a clear path to the door. His eye caught Margaret’s. Roused by the commotion, she peered in from the hallway, small and even whiter-faced in the white ribboned nightgown sewn from one of Mrs. Farley’s many patterns.

  “He’s all right,” Mr. Farley cried. “He’s all right!”

  Jesse-boy tried to lift his head. He looked around then moaned and closed his eyes.

  “He’s all right! He’s fine!” Mr. Farley declared, and with that as her signal, Mrs. Farley sprung at Thomas, pinning him against the wall. She shook him so hard his head banged the wall. “Why’d you do that? Why’d you do that to him? You bad thing! You horrible, horrible boy!” Spray from her mouth hit his face. Out in the hallway Margaret sobbed, shrieking for her to leave him alone! Leave her brother alone!

  “I told you it wouldn’t work,” Mr. Farley said as he settled Jesse-boy into his wheelchair. “They’re from a whole other place, kids like them.”

  School started up again the following Monday. Jesse-boy’s breathing was back to normal, wheezing only when he got excited. Mr. Wentworth was extremely considerate of Jesse-boy. When Mrs. Farley peeked in to wave hello, he insisted she come in and hear Jesse-boy recite from the Declaration of Independence. The smoking incident had terrified Margaret. She begged Thomas to be good so he wouldn’t be sent away. Sent away? Sent away where? She didn’t know, but she’d heard them through the floor grate. The boy was no good. Just like the father and mother. One more incident, Mr. Farley told his wife, and he’d have to go. Boys do those things, she tried to placate her husband. Jesse-boy was just learning how to be a boy, that’s all. He’s almost sixteen! Mr. Farley said. It’s time he learned how to be a man.

  It was a blustery day when Gladys came to visit. She was all dressed up; well, dressed up for Gladys in a faded navy blue dress, the seams worn lighter, shiny like the seat of her skirt. Her run-down black loafers were like a man’s, they were so wide on her big feet. She had business in town to see to, she told Mrs. Farley through the door screen, but first she’d like to say hello to the children. They were at the kitchen table eating lunch with Mr. Wentworth, leftover pork chops and milk gravy. It was the old teacher’s main meal of the day, so when Mrs. Farley told Gladys the children had to get right back to their lessons, he was quick to allow them fifteen extra minutes. He slid the last chop onto his plate and held his tie back in his reach for more gravy. “Take your time,” he called after them.