Mr. Bones (6 page)

Obviously he'd liked the house, he didn't want to risk losing it, he wasn't a bargainer, and he was pressed for time, house hunting after work. It was: buy the house, pay the rest of the money with a mortgage, or lose the deposit. “Our life's savings—wasted!”

My father suffered, smiling sheepishly through a number of scenes at the dinner table—and other times too. I heard bedroom recriminations, rare in our household. But in a short time the mortgage was granted, the house was bought, and we moved—a huge disruptive event in a family with few, almost no, events that involved a substantial outlay of money. It was the only time we moved house, and what made it memorable were my mother's tears. After it was done, her father and mother paid a visit. Her father—sententious, pinched and pious, a self-proclaimed orphan—looked at the house, surveyed the street, pronounced it a disaster, and said, “Poor Anna.”

The house was large but odd-shaped, bony and tall and narrow, like a cereal box, the narrow side to the street, the wide side a wall of windows, and somehow unfinished—the kitchen not quite right, the doors either sagging or poorly fitting or missing, varnished cabinets of thin wood, the floors creaky and uneven. But it had four bedrooms. Fred and Floyd shared a room with bunk beds. “There's room for the piano,” my father said in a voice of hollow enthusiasm.

“Life's savings” was probably an exaggeration, but not much: my father's new job was menial, a shoe clerk. He was grateful for the job, but a man selling shoes spends a great deal of time on his knees.

He never stopped smiling that winter. His smile said, All's well. Mother banged the kitchen cabinets to demonstrate the loose hinges, the broken latches. She tugged at the front door, exaggerating the effort, saying she was coming down with a cold because of the drafts, sighing loudly, all the sounds and gestures in the theater of discontent.

Dad said, “Say, I'll see to that.”

He was imperturbable, not so chummy as to cause offense, but deferentially amiable. “How can I help?” A kind of submissiveness you'd see in the native of a remote colony, with the wan demeanor of a field hand or an old retainer.

Spring came. The roof began to leak, the gutters were rotted, the nailed-on storm windows proved hard to take down. Now that we were less confined by winter, we could see that the house was big and plain and needed paint.

Dad began to paint it, with a borrowed ladder and a gallon of yellow paint. A neighbor saw him and said in a shocked voice, “You're not going to paint that house yellow!”

So Dad returned the yellow and bought some cans of gray.

“That's a lot better,” the neighbor said.

My mother pointed out that he'd dripped gray paint onto the white trim. He corrected it by repainting the trim.

Mother said, “Now you've gone and dripped white paint on the shingles.”

Dad smiled, repainting, never quite getting it right.

Anticipating warm weather and insects, he put up screens. The screens were wobbly and rusted; holes had been poked in them.

“Didn't you look at the screens before?”

She was talking about January, when he'd bought the house. This was mid-March.

The stove was unreliable. The fuel oil in the heater gurgled and leaked from the pump, and that had to be replaced by a plumber, Dad's fellow choir member Mel Hankey. He worked for nothing, or for very little, groaning in wordless irritation as he toiled, like giving off a smell.

My father's new job was a problem: long hours, low pay, my mother home with the small children, and pregnant—due in June. She was heavy and walked with a tippy, leaning-back gait, supporting her belly with one hand, seeming to balance herself as she moved.

“I lost a child two years ago.”

As though she was threatening to lose this one.

Dad said, “It's going to be fine.”

“How would you know?”

He smiled, he had no reply. As a sort of penance he washed the dishes, calling out, “Who's going to dry for me?” And because of the tension, each of us said, “I'll do it!” and pushed around trying to be helpful, like terrified children in a drunken household. But there was no drunkard here, only a disappointed woman and her smiling husband.

I said he had no recreations. He had one, the choir, legitimate because it was church-related. He had a strong, confident, rather tuneless voice, with a gravelly character, and even if thirty other people were singing, I could always discern my father's voice in the “
Pange Lingua
” or “
O Salutaris.
”

“You're not going out again?”

“Say, I've got choir practice.”

He prays twice who sings to the Lord
was printed on the hymnal. He believed that. Choir practice was more than a form of devotion, an expression of piety; it was a spiritual duty. But Dad always went alone, never taking any of us as initiates to the choir, and he always came back happy—not in anything he said, but his mood was improved, you could tell by the tilt of his head, his movements, his breathing, the way he listened, with a different sort of smile, a relaxed posture, his walk. He weighed less. He was always happier after he sang.

April came.

“The house is full of flies.”

“I'll take care of that.”

He patched the screens with little glued-on squares of screen.

“And the paint's peeling.”

Instead of priming it or waiting until the summer, he'd painted over the grime and the paint hadn't stuck.

“The faucet drips.”

“Say, I'll pick up some washers on the way home from choir.”

“This is the second time I've mentioned it.”

Dad was putting on his hat, snapping the brim, looking jaunty.

“You never listen.”

All he did was listen, but there's a certain sort of nagging repetition that can deafen you. We didn't know we'd come to the end of a chapter, that we were starting a new chapter. And after it was over we knew Dad much better, or rather knew a different side of him.

 

The wickedest episodes of revelation can have the most innocent beginnings. This one began with a song. It seized my attention at the time, but looking back on it, it seems even weirder, scarier, almost unbelievable, except that I witnessed it all and even now remember it with reluctance because of my crush of embarrassment. I came to understand that my father's smiles made him an enigma; but for a brief period I knew him, and though it was a kind of comedy, I was frightened and ashamed and shocked. The revelation unfolded obliquely, growing worse.

He came home carrying a large envelope with a tucked-in flap. Trying to look casual, he got his fingers inside and with a self-conscious flourish took out some pages of sheet music. The illustration on the cover showed a black man in a gleaming top hat, white gloves, mouth smilingly open in the act of singing. I could see from his features that he was a white man wearing makeup.

“Say”—Dad was rattling the pages—“can you play this, Mother?”

Asking a favor always made him shy. Being asked a favor made Mother ponderous and powerful.
Oh, so now you want something, do you?
she seemed to reply in the upward tilt of her head and triumphant smile.

She looked with a kind of distaste at the sheet music, plucking at it with unwilling fingers, as though it was unclean. And it
was
rather grubby, rubbed at the edges, torn at the crease where it was folded on the left side. It showed all the signs of having been propped on many music stands. Old, much-used sheet music had a limp cloth-like look.

After a while, Mother brought herself and her big belly to the piano. She spun the stool's seat to the right height and, balancing herself on it, reached over her pregnancy as if across a counter. Frowning at the music, she banged out some notes—I knew from her playing that she was angry. Dad leaned into his bifocals.

 

Mandy

There's a minister handy

And it sure would be dandy . . .

 

He gagged a little, cleared his throat, and began again, in the wrong key.

He could not read music, though he could carry a tune if he'd heard it enough times. In this first effort he struggled to find the melody.

“You're not listening,” Mother said.

“Just trying to . . . ,” he said, and clawed at the song sheet instead of finishing the sentence.

He started to sing again, reading the words, but too fast, and Mother was pounding the keys and tramping on the pedals as though she was at the wheel of some sort of vehicle, like a big wooden bus she was driving down a steep hill with her feet and hands.

 

Mandy

There's a minister handy . . .

 

Hearing the blundering repetition of someone being taught something from scratch was unbearable to me, because, probably from exasperation, I learned it before they did. I was usually way ahead while they were still faltering. I was always in a fury for it to be over.

I left the room, but even two rooms away I heard,

 

So don't you linger

Here's the ring for your finger

Isn't it a humdinger?

 

Against my will I listened to the whole thing until the song was in my head, not as it was meant to be sung, but in Dad's tuneless and halting rendition.

Later, over dinner, in reply to a question I didn't hear, Dad said, “Fella gave it to me—loaned it. I'll have to give it back afterwards.”

“Who loaned it?”

“John Flaherty.”

“Why?”

“Mel Hankey loaned it to him.”

“What's it for?”

“Minstrel show.”

Mother made a face. He was eating. As though to avoid further questions, Dad filled his mouth with food and went on eating, with the faraway look he assumed when he didn't want to be questioned.
I'm busy thinking,
his expression said.
You don't want to interrupt.

Then, out of the side of his mouth, he said, “Pass the mouse turd, sonny.”

We stared at him. He was chewing.

“Tell you a great meal,” he said. “Lettuce. Turnip. And pea.”

He winked. We had no idea.

“Minstrel show,” he seemed to feel, explained everything—and perhaps it did, but not to me. Words I had never heard before had a significance for him, and a private satisfaction. But “mouse turd”?

After that, he practiced the song “Mandy” every night, singing with more confidence and tunefulness, Mother playing more loudly, thumping her pedaling feet. His voice was strong, assertive rather than melodious. Within a week, he grew hoarse, lost his voice, and from the next room it was as though another man was singing, not Dad but a growly stranger.

Around this time, having mastered the song, he revealed his new name. This was at the dinner table, Mother at one end, Dad at the other, Fred, Floyd, Rose, and me between them.

“Fella says to me, ‘Wasn't that song just beautiful? Didn't it touch you, Mr. Bones?' I says, ‘No, but the fella that sang it touched me, and he still owes me five bucks.'”

“Who's Mr. Bones?” I asked.

“Yours truly.”

“No, it's not,” Fred said.

“Only one thing in the world keeps you from being a barefaced liar,” he said to Fred.

We were shocked at his suddenness.

“Your mustache,” Dad said, and wagged his head and chuckled.

“I don't have a mustache,” Fred said.

Mother got flustered when she heard anyone telling a joke. She said, “Don't be stupid.”

“You think I'm stupid,” Dad said eagerly. “You should see my brother. He walks like this.” He got up from the table and bent over and hopped forward.

He did have a brother, that was the confusing part.

“You're so pretty and you're so intelligent,” he said, striking a pose with Mother, using that new snappy voice.

“I wish I could say the same for you.”

Dad laughed, a kind of cackle, as though it was just what he wanted to hear. He said, “You could, if you told as big a lie as I just did.” He nudged me and said, “She was too ugly to have her face lifted. They lowered her body instead.”

With that, he skipped out of the room, his hands in the air, and I thought for a moment that Mother was going to cry.

 

He had become a different man, and it had happened quickly, just like that, calling himself Mr. Bones and teasing us, teasing Mother. She was bewildered and upset. The song he mastered he kept humming, and his jokes, not really jokes, were more like taunts.

“Maybe it's his new job,” Fred said in the bedroom after lights out.

Floyd said, “It's this house. Ma hates it. It's Dad's fault. He's just being silly.”

“What's a minstrel show?” I asked.

No one answered.

Trying to be friendly, Mother asked Dad about his job a few days later.

“They said I'd be a connoisseur, but I'm just a common sewer.”

Then that gesture with the hands, waggling his fingers.

“Said I'd be a pretty good physician, but I said, ‘I'm not good at fishin'.' Or a doctor of some standing. I says, ‘No, I'm sitting—in the shoe department.'”

Mother said coldly, “We need new linoleum in the upstairs bathroom.”

“And you need new clothes, because your clothes are like the two French cities, Toulouse and Toulon.”

“Don't be a jackass.”

“
Mister
Jackass to you.”

“I wish John Flaherty hadn't given you that music.”

“Lightning Flaherty said I needed it. Tambo gave it to him. Play it for me again, I need a good physic.”

Mother began to clear the table.