After the Parade (11 page)

Everywhere they drove, his father had told stories like these, the town as familiar to him as his own living room, but never once had he said, “That house over there, the white brick with the perfect yard? That's where my brother lives.” He had never even said that he had a brother.

“Ready to meet your cousins?” asked his uncle, and they went inside the white brick house, where a woman and too many children for Aaron to make sense of at once were waiting at a long table. His uncle sat down at the head and motioned to the empty chair beside him. Aaron wanted to wash his hands first, but he was too nervous to ask. They bowed their heads and recited a lengthy prayer, and because Aaron was not familiar with praying, he kept his head down longer than the others. When he looked up, everyone was staring at him. There was no talking during dinner, just the impressive sound of many forks and knives being utilized at once. A girl slightly older than him tipped over her milk, and his uncle turned to her and said, “What's that good for?,” which was what Aaron's father had always said when he spilled. At the end of the meal, they prayed again, and the girl who had spilled her milk was told to apologize.

“God, I'm sorry I spilled my milk,” she said, her voice delicate as porcelain.

“That you have so graciously provided,” her father said.

“That you have so graciously provided,” she repeated.

“Fine,” Aaron's uncle announced. “Everyone who has eaten what was put before him is excused. Devotions will be read in one hour.”

Two boys remained at the table. They sat with their backs straight, staring ahead rather than down at the onions that they had extracted with great care from the potato salad. “So, Matthew, Mark,” their father said, sounding strangely jovial. “No onions for you boys tonight?”

The boys did not answer.

“Well, I guess you know what to do.”

They rose and pushed open the sliding glass door that led out to the backyard, and their father called after them, “And not from the elm.”

Aaron's aunt came in from the kitchen. “Popcorn with devotions?” she asked.

“Yes,” his uncle said, “but none for Matthew and Mark.”

She spoke to Aaron for the first time. “Do you like popcorn?” she asked hopefully. He told her that he did, and she said, “I'm glad.” He picked up a plate from the table to help the way he did at home. “Aaron,” she said, “that's not for boys.” He could see the girls moving around in the kitchen, washing dishes and making order.

Matthew and Mark returned, each carrying a stick from which the bark had been peeled. They handed the sticks to their father, turned, and lowered their pants, revealing buttocks as pale as the flesh of the stripped branches. Only then did Aaron understand that the boys were about to be spanked. He wondered what they had thought about as they searched for the perfect sticks and prepared them with the knowledge that the sticks would soon be used against them. His father had delivered spankings with his belt, which he unbuckled and slid slowly from its loops. If he was still wearing his uniform, there was an extra step, the removing of the holster, a step he had conducted with great ceremony, as if the spanking were an official duty.

Aaron did not want to watch his cousins getting spanked, so he studied a clay reproduction of the Last Supper that hung on the dining room wall. The hanging had broken and been mended poorly, the largest crack creating the appearance of a rift between those to Jesus's left and those to the right, with Jesus himself at the epicenter. Behind
Aaron the sticks whizzed through the air, but Matthew and Mark were silent. At last, he heard his uncle leave the room, his cousins zippering their pants and leaving also.

Next to the Last Supper was a painting of a man. “Your uncle painted that,” his aunt said from behind him. “He made it for my birthday a few years ago.” Aaron tried to imagine his uncle sitting in a room holding a paintbrush, but he could not. “It's the nicest gift I ever received,” his aunt declared. “It's not paint-by-number. It's all freehand.”

“Who is it?” he asked.

“It's Jesus,” said his aunt. She sounded horrified by his question, but Aaron had seen pictures of Jesus and this looked nothing like him.

“Why is he wearing a stocking cap?”

“That's the crown of thorns,” his aunt said. With her finger, she traced the rivers of blood that ran from the crown down Jesus's face. The blood was cherry red, which gave the painting a festive quality. She went back into the kitchen, and Aaron crept over to the table by the door on which his uncle had dropped the box with his dress shoes. When he lifted the lid, he missed his mother and their house with a sudden, sick longing.

His uncle came back into the room carrying a rolled-up newspaper. “Don't stand there gawking,” he said, swatting Aaron across the head with the paper.

“May I use the bathroom?” Aaron asked.

“You've got ten minutes before devotions.”

Aaron could hear the sound of popcorn popping in the kitchen. His aunt peeked out. “Aaron, what do you like to drink with your popcorn?” she asked.

She didn't list possibilities, so he said, “Water, please.”

“Water,” said his uncle angrily, as though Aaron had requested beer.

“You can't drink water with popcorn,” his aunt explained. “The water will taste like fish.” Aaron had drunk water with popcorn plenty of times and never noticed a fish taste, nor did he understand why a fish taste would be bad.

“How about root beer?” his aunt suggested, and Aaron nodded, though he did not like root beer. Occasionally on Sunday evenings, his father had said, “How about we drive over to the A&W for supper?” His father liked the A&W, where one could stay in the car instead of having to go inside and eat surrounded by strangers. Aaron always asked for orange pop, which his father nixed. “This is A&W,” he said. “You'll have root beer like everyone else.” The root beer came in Goldilocks sizes, and because his mother always ordered the Baby Bear even though there was a Mama Bear, Aaron knew that she wanted something other than root beer also.

“You better get to the bathroom,” his uncle said. “I warmed the seat up for you.”

The smell began in the hallway, like rotting potatoes. When he pushed open the bathroom door and stepped in, the odor was so thick he thought he could feel it on his skin. He picked up a towel and held it to his nose, but he could not urinate like that, so he held his breath, set down the towel, and lifted the toilet seat. When he had finished, he flushed and watched, first with interest and then alarm, as the water rose in the bowl. A plunger sat in a rusted coffee can nearby, and he jammed it into the toilet, but it was too late. As the water streamed over the sides, he opened the bathroom door and called for help. His aunt came running, and they stood together beside the toilet, his aunt pumping the plunger up and down.

“My goodness, Aaron,” she said, not unkindly but with some dismay as they stared at the coil of feces floating on the surface. It was as big around as his arm. He reddened, wondering how she could possibly believe he had produced such a thing.

“Hurry up,” called his uncle from the living room.

“You better go,” his aunt said. She knelt and began mopping up the dirty water, wringing the rag into an ice cream bucket. He went into the living room, where the others sat waiting. They stared at him, this boy who had come home with their father, plugged up the toilet, and delayed devotions. One of the girls handed him a cereal bowl of popcorn, which she said he could not touch until devotions began. When his aunt joined them, she set her bowl on the floor away from her.

His uncle handed Mark a small booklet, from which Mark began to read a story about a young man who had been wounded in Vietnam. Aaron knew that Vietnam was a war because his father had talked about it at the supper table, especially about the Draft Dodgers, of whom his father spoke with great contempt. At first, Aaron did not know who the Draft Dodgers were or why his father hated them, but he did know what a draft was. When his mother came into his room at bedtime, she wiggled his window shut, saying, “You need to keep this closed, Aaron. There's a draft. You don't want to get sick.” Then, she laid her hand on his brow for just a moment. There was nothing better than the feel of her warmth against his coolness.

“What are Draft Dodgers?” he asked her one night after his father had spoken of them angrily throughout supper yet again.

“They're young men who run away to Canada to escape the draft,” his mother said, adding softly, “They don't want to die.” From the way she said this, Aaron knew that she considered it perfectly reasonable not to want to die. Then she reached up and wiggled his window closed, keeping him safe.

In the story that Mark read, there were no Draft Dodgers. The young man who came home wounded from Vietnam wrote to his mother from the hospital, asking whether he might stay with her until he got his strength back. He also requested permission to bring a friend who had lost both legs and had nowhere else to go. The mother wrote back, explaining that she looked forward to her son's homecoming. “But,” the letter went on, “I am not strong enough to care for someone without legs. I am sure that your friend has family that can take him in. I know you will understand.”

His aunt began to sob, and Mark read the ending quickly: the mother was soon visited by an army officer, who told her that her son had wheeled himself out a hospital window to his death. “It's like that sometimes,” the officer said. “A young man loses his legs and can't figure out how to go on.” His aunt gasped and sobbed even more, pressing her reddened hands to her mouth while his cousins stared into their empty popcorn bowls.

Aaron did not know what to make of the story. It was not until
he recalled it as a teenager that he realized the son had been talking about himself, that he was the legless friend. However, he would never understand—not as a teenager, not even as an adult—whether the son had killed himself because he felt his mother would no longer love him, or because he could not bear knowing that she had failed his test. Never did he consider that it had nothing to do with the mother at all.

*  *  *

“We're putting you in with Zilpah,” his uncle said. Zilpah was the cousin who had spilled her milk. “I know you might not like sharing with a girl, but she's the only one with her own room.” His aunt brought him a pair of Matthew's pajamas, and after he had changed, she told him to kneel on the floor to pray. He knelt on the orange carpet next to Zilpah, and then they stood and crawled into bed together, his head at her feet, as his aunt instructed.

“We're not allowed to study dinosaurs,” Zilpah said once they were alone in the dark room.

“Why?” he asked, though he had little interest in dinosaurs.

“My father says they're sinful.” Her voice floated up from his feet. “We also have to leave the room if the teacher talks about Edgar Allan Poe. He wrote a story about a man who cut up a heart and put it under the floor but it was still beating, like this—
boom, boom
.” She sounded like a flute impersonating a drum. “Ruth's teacher read them the story, and then Ruth told us the story at supper, and my father was very angry.”

“Why did he cut up the heart?” Aaron asked.

“Put your head under the blanket and I'll tell you.” He felt a rush of air on his feet as she lifted her end, and he did the same. “The devil told him to,” she whispered. He pulled his head back out because it frightened him to be under the blanket with her saying “devil” just to him.

“What's your name?” he asked, because all he could recall was that it was something strange.

She pulled her head out also. “Zilpah,” she said. “Z-I-L-P-A-H.” Aaron did not tell her that letters meant nothing to him because he had not yet started school. “It's very uncommon to have a name that starts
with
Z
. It's from the Old Testament. My father says the great achievements have been made by men and that makes it hard to find good Bible names for girls.”

“My mother named me after a lake,” he said. “Lake Aaron. She used to go swimming there with her grandfather when she was little.”

“Well, Aaron's a Bible name. The lake was probably named after the Bible,” Zilpah said. She giggled. “Do you ever wet the bed?”

“Not much,” he said, which was true.

“Me too,” she said. “Do you know that I have a condition?”

“What's a condition?” he asked.

“I have a condition with my heart. I was born that way.”

“Can the doctor fix it?” According to his mother, doctors could not fix everything.

“My father doesn't want them to,” Zilpah whispered. “He's healing me with prayer. The doctor told him he was being irresponsible.”

“What does
irresponsible
mean?” Aaron asked.

“It means he's not taking care of me,” she explained.

“The doctor said that?” It astonished him to think of someone saying such a thing to his uncle. “What did your father say?”

“He was very angry. He called the doctor ‘O ye of little faith.' Then he told my mother to get me ready to go home, and he went to get the car. The doctor talked to my mother outside my room, and when she came back in, she was crying. She put my things in the suitcase, and I got to ride in a wheelchair, and we came home.”

“My mother is in the hospital,” Aaron said.

“I know. Our mother told us. Does she have a condition?”

“I'm not sure,” said Aaron. “She cries a lot. Is that a condition?”

“Well, my mother cries a lot because of my condition. I don't really cry, except when I can't play with Matthew and Mark.”

“Is playing fun?” Aaron asked, for there was something about the dark room and Zilpah's voice that made him feel he could ask such things.