CHAPTER THREE

A NORMAL MAN’S DAUGHTER

As time passed, I cryptically imagined us as the Chang and Eng brothers of our town, the most famous of the conjoined twins. And I fantasized that he and I, like that pair, lived together for the remainder of our lives alongside our wives and many children.

I could never let him know that, of course. And even when he began spending more time away from the house, I understood his need to break away from passing all our free time together. Also, he revered Papa for making a life for himself.

“Why should he be prisoner to Momma’s demons?” he’d ask.

He’d borrow Papa’s shoes when he dressed up to go out.

I can’t say that I was at all surprised when one night he confided that he had a crush on a classmate of his, the only daughter of the most prominent undertaker in our town, who lived in a fine estate in the community where the Normal Men resided. And it wasn’t long before he announced the mortician had taken “a shine” to him, offering him a Saturday job washing all the funeral cars at Slade Hyde.

Since I had delivered floral arrangements to Hebron’s mortuaries, I was quite familiar with that one. Service people had to enter through the rear, past the hearse, flower car, and limousines. The shade of Slade Hyde’s 1930s Chrysler and Packard fleet was deep indigo. Set off from them was an exquisite hearse with elaborate carved mahogany paneling around and under the oblong windows of its viewing compartment.

“That’s the one I want,” Jeremiah exclaimed, referring to the Packard Phaeton V12 hearse. “Christ, she’s a beauty.”

But it was his unmitigated bravado that unsettled me. He honestly believed that it was just a matter of time before he would be residing in that grand residence and have access to all those antique automobiles, plus one of the loveliest young women in town.

Long after he’d fallen asleep, I’d lie awake, worrying about his fate.

JEREMIAH FALLS FOR A NORMAL MAN’S DAUGHTER

Jeremiah had acquired a penchant for exploring the unknown. Scaring the shit out of people, throwing himself into the teeth of danger, and then, after the show, when everybody went home—he’d crawl back out.

When he told me he was seeing Judith Hyde, I wasn’t surprised. Judith’s father owned the most prominent mortuary in town, and that summer it wasn’t uncommon to hear her pull up in our driveway in her indigo-blue convertible, looking for Jeremiah. I’d go out to speak with her when he was sleeping or not around. I complained to him about it, saying he should be more considerate.

He thought it was funny. “Who are you afraid of, Westley?”

“Nobody.”

“You got to learn how to treat a woman.”

“From you?”

“You can’t be afraid of them.”

“I’m not afraid of women.”

“The real ones, you are,” he said. “The kind that chew your balls off, huh? Not Jeremiah Mueller. I grab their headlights and yank them right to me. Laugh in their faces. That’s when they bend. That’s how to treat Mr. Taps, too.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Remember when you found Mama bent over the canning stove in the cellar? Mr. Taps smells like a woman.”

“You’re full of shit, Jeremiah.”

“Do you think men hang themselves ’cause they want to die?”

His impish grin curled up, revealing a splinter of teeth. “Huh-uh. They do it because they smell cunt.”

“You saying death smells like a woman?”

“Under the armpits. Between the legs.”

“You got a big imagination, too.”

“Mr. Taps smells just like a broad.” Jeremiah’s face was one of intense resolve.

“Sure,” I said, half mocking.

Judith phoned after nine o’clock that Saturday evening. “Has he left the house yet?” “Tell her I’m leaving now,” Jeremiah answered, and rolled back to sleep. She called at nine thirty, then ten. “Westley, lie for Chrissake!” He jumped up both times, switched off the overhead light, and fell back into our bed.

“Jeremiah’s sleeping, isn’t he, Westley?” It was after eleven.

I didn’t answer.

“Well, you don’t have to protect him any longer. Tell him not to bother showing up.”

Minutes later he came down the stairs, fully dressed to go out.

“She’s pissed, Jeremiah.”

“They bore you to tears when they aren’t,” he said.

It was Mrs. Hyde who phoned at 2:00 a.m. Pap wasn’t home. Mother hollered up the stairs, “Jeremiah’s in some kind of trouble, Westley.” Mother handed me the phone. Judith was on the line.

Jeremiah had taken her out the Old Wilmington Road for a ride. She was angry because of his apathy. “Always late, Westley,” as she put it. “I’m tired of it. Sometimes even missing our date.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

“You know the ravine behind Cringle’s farm? Down in there somewhere.”

“What do you mean?”

“He got hot over something I said. Stepped on the accelerator, began double- and triple-shifting—taking the country roads at high speed. I wanted out, but he kept accusing me.”

“Of what?”

“What else? What causes you men to go nuts?”

“Who is it, Judith?”

“Your brother asked me what I was doing Sunday evening. ‘You and I aren’t doing anything,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve got a date.’ That’s when he throttled it.”

“Is he hurt?”

“I don’t know. We’re heading straight down Cliff Road when he stiffens and jams on the brakes. The car fishtails. He opens his door and Johnny Weissmullers into the gorge.”

“Not a drop of water runs through that canyon, Judith. Did you go looking for him?”

I heard the whoosh of her cigarette lighter.

“You considered that he might be lying down in that ravine dead?”

“Jeremiah Mueller, dead?” She laughed. “Fat chance—and when he does come up out of that ravine, tell him Mama and me decided I won’t be seeing him again. He’s not to phone me up either.”

We didn’t know much about psychiatrists then. Only mental institutions like neighboring Dixmont employed them. Jeremiah began staying up in our room and refused to come downstairs.

“You sure I can’t fix you something to eat?” Mother asked.

He wanted nothing to do with me either, but lay up in the bedroom plotting—we weren’t certain what. Pap sat on the side of the bed to speak with him.

“How you feeling, son?”

“Did she call?” Jeremiah asked.

When no one answered, he never looked up.

Then Judith’s mother phoned again because Jeremiah had shown up, parking himself on their porch.

Mother twisted a paper napkin over in her fingers. “Oh, Mrs. Hyde,” Mother sighed.

Jeremiah had pressed his face right up against their screen door until Judith yelled, “Get off the damn porch!” and slammed the door.

“Not my nature to be sharing a woman . . . but I apologize,” Jeremiah said, and walked down off the steps, opened his car door, waved . . . then pulled his necktie taut behind his neck and jerked his head out of his collar like he was hanging himself.

“All the neighbors watching, Mrs. Mueller, and he just kept bawling out her name.”

I could only wait for what I knew was soon to occur. Mother, Papa, and I knew he was planning on his next dramatic move. We feared that it might be his final act.

The worrying over Jeremiah’s mental well-being had become a catalyst for bringing our parents together in a way I’d never experienced. Papa began hanging around the house after work. It was not unusual to see the two of them sitting quietly in the living room together, or on the front porch swing conversing.

Mother had ceased padding to the hallway window after dark to play the glass harmonium.

THIS SIDE OF THE MAGNOLIA TREES

“Jesus stands outside our bedroom door,” Jeremiah said.

When the lights in the house were extinguished and everybody was in bed, he’d crawl out of ours and place his ear to the door.

“What are you listening for?” I asked

“The circus man.”

“The circus man?”

“They pounded nails into his hands and feet, didn’t they? He’s some courageous dude. I want to hear his breathing.”

There were nights we heard nothing. Then we did.

“Come here, Westley,” he whispered. “Hurry!”

I slipped out of bed and put my head beside his against our wooden door. Heavy breathing. Then a kind of low moaning.

“Christ,” he whispered. “He’s reliving the event. They’re pounding him to the cross. Oh, can’t you just see it?”

Then we heard, “Yes . . . sweet Jesus, yes.”

“But it sounds like Mama,” I protested.

That’s when Jeremiah slapped me hard against my backside and began rolling over on the linoleum floor in laughter.

“You gullible queer!” he cried.

He jumped up onto the bed, clutching his groin.

“I’m the Circus Man!”

In a way, Jeremiah was. He never rode elephants or went up on the trapeze. But he liked to play with fire.

When I took communion for the first time—I had to learn the Twenty-third Psalm—Mother and I sat in the car, waiting for my brother to finish dressing. She was drumming on the horn to get him moving. When she heard the back door slam, she shoved her foot onto the ignition and throttled our old Dodge alive, never paying him any mind.

He looked fine, dressed in his Sunday best, but then there were these several-sizes-too-large two-tone black-and-white dancing shoes Father donned on summer evenings when he went out alone. Jeremiah had stuffed newspapers into the toe boxes and wore a solemn expression.

Anxious about whether I’d remember the Psalm, Mother handed off the bouquet of lilacs she’d freshly cut to present to me at the close of the communion.

“Jeremiah, go hand these flowers to your good brother.”

When he stepped into the aisle, parishioners cupped their hands over their mouths.

“Here, queer,” he announced, stumbling up the pulpit steps. “Compliments of the Circus Man.”

“What’s it feel like?” I asked as I lay next to him that night, feeling the heat coming off his red backside and knowing he was hurting.

“Circus men don’t cry,” he sniffed. “This ain’t nothin’.”

We knew it wasn’t—for each of us could feel it in our bones that one day we’d hear real breathing outside our door.

Father’s irreverence was more subtle.

Draping his tie over the crucifix that hung above their nuptial bed, for instance.

Or secreting spare bills he was saving for a rainy day between the pages of the Book of Revelations.

One reason for his apostasy was that our Uncle Alexander, his brother, was a monsignor. It’d be like Jeremiah wearing the clown shoes, I thought.

“Westley, suppose you saw your brother dressed up in a chasuble with a big silver crucifix dangling from his neck and blowing incense out of a lantern over the parishioners’ heads?”

“I’d think he was in the carnival,” I said.

“Not your grandmother. She believes he’s her ticket to heaven. ‘He’s going to save us all . . . even if the rest of you heathens don’t deserve it!’ she’d scold. But Alexander was a snotty-nosed prick. And now he’s even a bigger one in the Roman Catholic Church. But don’t let me stain your mind, son. Maybe your mama is right.”

I’d seen no sign that she was. Except my conscience talked like she was its ventriloquist.

Until the day Jeremiah set farmer Eli McKinley’s alfalfa field on fire. Racing through it—flames curling off him like ribbon. A charred scar in his wake. And a woman in a nearby farmhouse screaming on her porch, fanning the wind, deranged.

Father’s car down by the roadside, smoke puffing from under the hood. An air filter lying on the gravel alongside Jeremiah’s lit cigarette—and a container of gasoline.

That’s when I thought the Circus Man had finally come.

Pay up, Jeremiah. Show’s over.

For months Mother, Pap, and I sat next to his hospital bed, listening to his labored breathing, his legs and arms suspended from some trapeze-like contraptions, and us barely able to see through the bandage mask he wore. Except his eyes still kindled.

I was grateful for that.

Because I was a pansy. Not a queer—but a pansy. I ached to be fearless like Jeremiah but was afraid of heaven, the scolds who professed they were happy because they were Chosen, but I knew they could never be lighthearted like Jeremiah and our old man.

Theirs was a brittle kind of rapture. If you’d promise me God wouldn’t seek to avenge the irreverence, I thought the joke was on them.

Except the fire queered Jeremiah.

He wasn’t entertaining any longer. Our old man began going to bed when Mother read the Bible. He no longer smoked in bed.

Jeremiah even said it was time to be moving on.

“Whaddya mean?” I asked.

“Gettin’ out of here.”

“What about me?” I hollered.

He rolled over without answering. The next morning I awoke to find his side of the bed empty.

The only person who didn’t act surprised was Father.

“Where do you think he went?” I asked.

Jeremiah never let on. Even to him whom I know he revered. “Papa taught us to heavy breathe,” he said.

At night I’d call out, “Is that you, Circus Man? Will you give me a sign?”

But it was still as sin outside our bedroom door. Only the silver light of the moon puddled on the hallway floor.

A prelude, dear brother, to your journey across a meadow just this side of the magnolia trees, just this side of hell.