HORACE

AS WIDE AS you can make it without makin’ him a simpleton, put a smile on Tony’s face,” Jennie instructed Jimmy DiCarlo, the undertaker. “I don’t want no goddamn phoney tears to mar his tie.”

“He was a happy man, always happy, Jennie,” Jimmy offered gratuitously.

“Always,” she replied. “I’ll miss the old bastard.”

That night Jennie gathered his golf clubs, a fresh deck of cards and a bottle of Johnny Walker, and placed them alongside Anthony Prioletti, who, ready to greet the mourners, was all decked out in a seersucker suit, a stiff white shirt, and red satin tie.

“For Jennie Prioletti’s sake” is how my mother put it when she dragged me to the mortuary the following day. It was my first experience seeing a formerly live person in a casket, and the place was bustling with Tony’s cronies laughing and drinking champagne. Jennie worked the room like the Mayor. Tony’s face glowed salmon, the shade of the gladioli sprays nimbusing his head. He looked like he was napping on the back seat of a chartered bus, heading to a Sons of Italy golf tournament in the sky. Soon they’d break out the cards and the galvanized garbage containers of iced beer.

Death isn’t so scary after all, I concluded. Why was I worried about coming down with bulbar polio and dying in an iron lung? The Paramount—our only theatre—stopped its feature reel in the middle those years; the ushers would sweep up the aisles soliciting donations for the “Stop Polio!” campaign. On the screen they’d parade National Guard armories crowded with young children like myself confined to round steel cylinders that looked like oversized hot water heaters.

Then Patrick McCart, my friend from a couple streets over, and I spent a Saturday morning with our beebee guns shooting alley-cat rats up at the city dump located half mile up Cascade Street. The dump was always smoldering like biblical pictures of Hell. In some spots the flames geysered into the sky, especially if a new load of combustible material was dumped over the gorges by one of the many refuse trucks that trundled up and down our street night and day. A century earlier it had been a limestone quarry. There were great chasms, land shelves with precipitous dropoffs. Over decades water filled these quarries but eventually was displaced by the city’s debris. Now trucks would just back up to one of the ledges and unload. Periodically haulers would drop explosive material over the dump. Fireworks! Strange patterns shooting meteor-like through the sky. I lay in bed at night waiting for the eruptions up in the quarry hills. Always the acrid odor from the dump made us cough and spit.

I thought that’s how air smelled until we visited my Aunt Evelyn on the west side of Hebron. Mother, Aunt Evelyn, and I would sit out under the willow tree in her back yard in the summer time doing needlework, embroidering pansies and petunias on the wide hems of pillowcases for wedding and shower gifts. Aunt Evelyn gave me a basket of colored threads with wooden hoops and taught me how to make a giant needle-work sunflower. I practiced on my Uncle’s handkerchief.

Uncle Ed drove an ice cream truck. Occasionally when I’d pass him on the street, he’d stop, get out of his truck, walk to the back and open its freezer door—the truck was built like a refrigerator—and hand me a Klondike bar. I thought about that out there with the two women, we’re all making flowers on white percale, nobody saying a word, the monarch butterflies landing about our feet . . . and no garbage smoke. I thought this was heaven, too.

Then I see Patrick McCart’s ashen face staring accusingly at me from the rear of DiCarlo’s ambulance one late afternoon following school. I ran home to inquire of my mother what’d happened. “Polio,” she said. “His mother had just made him curtains for his bedroom, too—white sheets with red hulls and royal-blue sails. Patrick came home ill from school.”

It was the damn mayonnaise. He and I’d been horsing around throwing cans, tossing disgusting debris at each other that morning three months back at the city dump. I found a rotting jar of mayonnaise, scooped it out with a stick, then lobbed it at him. The glop smacked him on his cheek, causing him to retch. Our laughter stopped. Patrick wanted to go home. He never made it into the water heater.

Aunt Evelyn had this neighbor friend, his name was Horace, about forty years old, same as my aunt, the son of Mrs. McCool in the neighboring house. One day when I went visiting her on my own, she said we should call Horace to come down and see us. We cut through the viburnum bushes alongside her peach bungalow. She lived on a hill off a dirt road. Horace’s house you couldn’t see for the trees. She called him like she was calling a dog she was privately friendly with out of the woods. Horace and his mother had lived up there as long as Aunt Evelyn could remember.

“Horace!” she yelled. “Come on down here. I want you to meet young Westley.”

Soon I heard a screen door slam.

“You hear?” Aunt Evy said. “He’s coming. Talk to him like you might anybody, Uncle Ed, say.”

Uncle Ed was always telling dirty stories. Then laughing so hard I’d join in, even though I couldn’t quite understand. He told me he came home every day for lunch and laid Aunt Evelyn on the mohair sofa in their living room. After, he’d eat an egg sandwich and have his coffee. Do it in the nighttime, too, he said. Then begin laughing.

One story he told was when he was younger he’d broken his arm playing City League Softball, but that didn’t stop him from still stabbing Aunt Evelyn on the sofa. Three days later during their matinee, he was trying to shift positions in the love act when he tumbled off the couch and broke his leg. That set him howling.

Ed was portly and not too bright like Aunt Evelyn said Horace was. “Horace can recite history better than any book you read in school,” she said.

Aunt Evelyn, about five years ago, had started to flutter, vibrate. First it was her hands. Then over time we noticed it creep up her arms. Then her head. The head just sort of bobbed on the top of Evy’s torso. Yet, Uncle Ed and her were still doin’ it, close to twenty years now.

Well, when I saw Horace, he looked normal enough, excepting he was skinny and his arms moved independent of his mind. His hair was long, too. He looped down through the beech trees and under one arm were several composition books, and in the pocket of his shirt (his sleeves were rolled up above his elbows) ink pens and pencils were lined up. Looked like a dozen. He wore gold-rimmed glasses that were bottle-thick.

“This is my nephew Westley, Horace. He’s a bright young boy. Like you Horace. He’s also my dear friend, just like you, Horace. I told him you know more history than his school book. That you in truth know more dates and numbers and facts than any single book in the whole wide world! Ain’t that right, Horace?”

Horace blushed and turned away, sounding an embarrassed chortle. He lifted his feet up and down on the grass rhythmically. It’s then I spotted his right ear—it’d grown back into Horace’s head like a bellybutton.

“Ask Horace a question, Westley.”

We’d just been studying the Civil War in grade school. “General Sumpter,” I said.

“General Sumpter?”

“Yes.”

“His wife or his children? Their ages or their names? His house or its acreage? His battles, their dates, casualties—men or horses—or their rations?”

Evelyn interrupted. She could see Horace becoming more anguished, crimson was rising up into his face fast. It was as if he were about to explode in frustration. She told me later she was afraid he’d scream and begin running through their woods. Mrs. McCool would get upset with her.

“Westley, don’t confuse Horace! The questions must be very precise. He will answer any of your history questions. But frame them precisely.

“How tall was General Sumpter, Horace?” she volunteered. “That’s what the boy wants to know.”

“Six feet four inches,” came the rapid response with a grand sigh. Like the air coming out of one of Uncle Ed’s tires on his sporty Ford coupe with the metal tire holder looking like a spoke wheel attached to its trunk.

“Was he handsome, Horace?”

“Very handsome, Ma’am. Blue eyes and soldierly bearing. Size twelve shoes and walked with a slight limp. Not a war injury. A farm implement injury—a harrow. His wife’s name was Emma. They had twelve children, Sadie, Beatrice . . .”

At that point Aunt Evelyn again interrupted. “That’s fine, Horace. You did very well.” And Horace blushed again, going into his little tap routine on the grass, turning the knotted ear to both of us like a cyclopean eye. I sat down in the grass, Horace alongside me. He moved close.

“Are you my friend?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered after glancing up to Aunt Evelyn to see how I should respond.

“Fine,” he said. “I like scholars.”

Aunt Evelyn nodded.

Then told me she’d be down in the kitchen if I needed anything, leaving me there in the tall grass with Horace. “Two scholars” he kept repeating matter-of-factly like he was cementing sod in the earth, tamping it down to get a firm catch. Then he held out two pencils, a red one and blue one, asking me to take the one I wanted. He handed me a composition book. I opened it up and there were letters and numbers in very orderly columns but at random angles across each of its pages. The letter Q followed by a 3865, say, then a grouping of letters—some uppercase some lower with no definable pattern emerging, trailed by the numbers again. Nothing in any order apparent to me. No series of letters spelled a word—backward, forward, or jumbled—that I knew. But they were written with a most careful hand, like a scrivener’s, page after page.

Periodically I’d find a blank page. As I leafed through the book, he watched me intently. I was careful to show no emotion. Finally I looked up to see if I could at least fathom some reason in his eyes for these hundreds and hundreds of columns, almost as if they were thin glass vials in which he had dropped a number, a series of letters, then more numbers, a letter and a number and so on to the vial’s rim, then capped the cylinder to begin a new one. Test tube cylinders, perhaps. Page after page all in pencil.

Horace beamed when I looked at him. Immensely proud of what he had achieved. “This is magnificent, Horace.”

We were sitting but his feet began to twitch as if they were shuffling that dance, that embarrassed dance again, and the belly-knot ear swung round to eye me like a search light.

“Westley,” he said. “Only Horace can do this. Nobody in this whole wide world . . .” and he gestured back to his mother McCool’s house and then to Aunt Evelyn’s house, then off to the woods and the dirt street. “Only Horace McCool can do this. Come,” he said, “I’ll teach you.” And he flipped open to one of the blank pages in my composition book. “I’ve saved that one for you,” he said.

He opened his book to a fresh page.

“Just begin,” he said. “First . . . ,” he reflected and looked up into Aunt Evelyn’s willow tree, “a . . . G!” he cried.

I wrote a G.

“329810!” These came in a rush.

I columned these. He cast a critical eye over my work. I had written 32 under the G. This upset him. He erased it, wrote the 3 then the 2 under the 3.

“OK,” he said.

And that’s how we spent that afternoon in the grass. Writing random numbers and letters (apparently they weren’t) into his “journals.” Towards the end of our sessions, he looked exhausted.

“Are you tired?” I asked.

I could see the sun beginning to fall behind Aunt Evelyn’s house. The sweat had gathered on both our bodies, and the flies were becoming pesky. Horace slapped at them, anguished, as if they were meddlesome children who wouldn’t let us alone.

“Yes,” he said, “very tired.”

“Let’s put the journals away for today, Horace.”

“Yes, let’s,” he said. I gathered his pencil and mine, placed them back into his shirt pocket exactly in the order they came. I stood up, then reached down to lift him out of the tall grass.

He turned to walk slowly back toward Mother McCool’s house. Like he was dead tired.

“I’ll tell my class I met General Sumpter’s historian in the woods today, Horace!” I hollered up to him. He turned his head so that I saw the deformed ear. Down in the grass where we had been sitting that long afternoon, it looked like a deer or a lion or perhaps a bear had napped. The day was drawing to a close. Shortly Uncle Ed would return home. The two of them would disappear into their darkened living room. The shades were always drawn when I walked through her house.

I could hear Uncle Ed laughing, talking sweet talk to Aunt Evelyn; her rejoinder would always be a gentle, “Come on, Ed, get on with it. Please.”

I’d think about Klondike bars and General Sumpter and Horace with the bellybutton ear and Tony Prioletti’s happy wake. Patrick McCart’s unhappy one, and the spot in the field where the tall grass had been tamped down and where Horace and me sat . . . thinking somebody had laid there in the hot afternoon and the sun rolled down over Aunt Evelyn’s hill and her hurrying Ed on and him chortling, riding her down into the old wire-spring sofa lunch time, dinner time, and Horace, up in his shuttered house with Mother McCool, building glass cylinders of random numbers and letters in column containers, some code that he understood, one ear already turned inward . . . . And I thought about the Joker and the Kings and Queens in Tony’s casket, the games of chance and the ether-booze to smooth the edges of surprise.

Then I’d go back inside Aunt Evelyn’s house when I’d hear her in the kitchen.

“Your Uncle Ed’s taking a nap on the sofa,” she’d remind. “We must be quiet. How did you like Horace?” she asked.

I looked out her window beyond the willow tree seeing the day die, and became afraid of the oncoming night. Watching Horace tiredly lope back through the trees toward home to the darkened Mother McCool’s house, it all bubbling inside me sad . . . Christ, it all felt so hollow, like I was spinning away from earth . . . and I’d hear Uncle Ed snoring on the mohair sofa, and watch her bent over the stove in the darkening kitchen, fry pan of eggs all twirled together, her shaking, shuddering, her feet almost dancing like Horace’s when he blushed.

I wanted it to stop.

“It’s time for you to go home, Westley,” she said. Uh-huh, I thought. I know. There are even stranger things you don’t want me to see.

“OK,” I answered. “I’ll come back again soon, Aunt Evelyn. “Thanks for the wonderful day.”

She’d nod just like Horace. Still stirring the eggs in the black skillet. Never looking up. Trembling, shuddering, the kitchen becoming darker by the minute. Her dance on the linoleum floor more agitated.

“Soon, Westley. Soon.”

On my way home, as I walked through the shadowy streets of Hebron, I tried to think of Tony’s funeral. How giddy everyone was. The big smile on his face. How he’d be playing golf somewhere now at twilight. Or sitting in his old garden shed in the sky playing cards with his cronies and drinking booze.

That night I dreamed about the battle of General Sumpter, but saw Horace, with his knotted ear, in cavalry attire. Behind him were all these medics carrying litters. Horses dragging litters. On these litters were columns of numbers and letters. But the columns were bent and twisted; they were broken. Single numbers and letters were falling, dripping on the battlefield’s grass like blood. And General Horace’s stony face, wounded, resigned, headed to the McCool house through the woods. In the background I could hear a dirge, a loud moaning sound, a mournful cry as if it rose out of the ground, and I looked up and saw General Horace McCool stop the procession, draw his left hand to cover his good ear, capping it.

Within days Mother met me at school. “Evelyn’s dead,” she said. I cried unashamedly on the schoolhouse steps. Sitting in the back seat of the old Dodge, I tried to envision happy things, and saw Uncle Ed passing out Klondike bars at the wake. To Horace and me, Mother and Father and all Evelyn’s friends. And I tried to think of happy things in her casket. I saw a huge sunflower lifted from the back of her property lying next to her, casting its mustardy twilight on her cheeks. Her head no longer randomly shaking. And vials of colored water, violet, raspberry-red, and a sea-green, with ginger-brown stoppers, lying alongside her right hand. A kind of watery resurrection, the water of the streams in heaven, I thought . . . and the children eating Klondike bars smiling and saying goodbye to her and how we’d meet her up in the fields, up there next to Mrs. McCool’s house, waiting for her to call the Horaces of this world to come out and play with us and take all our tears away.

To teach us the history of life. And just how goddamn blue General Sumpter’s eyes really were.

“Goodbye, sweet Evelyn,” I said. You knew his bellybutton ear would never startle me. How I’d think it looked like a strange exotic flower, really. You knew how I’d never embarrass you or him. The Horace to whom no one else in our family would you dare introduce.

“And you also knew how quickly afternoons come to an end. That the Uncles of this world would soon arrive home. That you’d have to undress. Not in the grass, but on the semen-encrusted, umber-wool sofa the two of you had bought on time twenty years earlier. Then after he shot, you’d stir up his eggs in the black skillet at dark.”