THE SCAR

I

THE POST OFFICE Café was where our old man hung out on Saturday morning. Westley and I thought he’d be lubricated enough by noon to answer our genealogical questions. Regaling several of his drinking buddies and Grace, the bartender, with ribald wit, Father greeted us amiably. His friends suggested we were damn near old enough to drink the old man under the table.

But drinking held no attraction for either of us.

“Pap, we got a few questions for you.”

“Yeah. Sure. Where you going? You need some money?”

“No. We’re fine.” Westley was frank and direct with the old man. “Pap, Ma said we could go visit Grandma and Grandpa Coleridge if we wanted.”

“You shitting me?”

“It’s for real. Sort of like a history lesson. What’s the rest of them like?”

He lost his color, then uttered darkly, “Vipers.”

“Don’t bullshit us, Pap.” Westley tried to humor him.

“See for yourself.” He turned back to the bar.

“They can’t be that bad,” I said.

“Let me tell you both something,” he guided us off our chromium bar stools and led us into the back of the café, where several pinball machines were lined up against one wall, casting a curious yellow-and-blue glow on our faces. “Those people down there in sheep-shit hollow mean nothing but trouble. Why in Christ’s name do you think we never told you about them? Why don’t we carve the goddamn turkey with either her family or mine, or knock on their doors at Christmas?

“They’re trouble, that’s why. Particularly your mother’s brood. Crepe hangers, malingerers, thieves, convicts, bill jumpers, whores, and worst of all, downright snake-mean. Knock on their fucking doors all you want, but cry out you ain’t a couple of bill collectors, or they’ll shoot the baby balls off both your asses sooner than look at you.”

He escorted us back up the aisle of the café, took the several dollars of change he had lying on the counter next to his glass of beer and shot tumbler, stuffed the bills in my shirt pocket, and feigned a hearty farewell, lying so everybody could hear him: “Enjoy the ball game, Sons! Mahoning Township over Nashanock by three runs. We’ll split the winnings!”

A tiny movie theatre, several ladies’ stores, one men’s shop featuring a Dizzy Gillespie cutout, a hair salon, and a McGory’s five-and-ten clustered at the heart of Long Avenue; farther along, sorry bungalows hugged its curbs clear to the horizon. Just beyond the commercial section stood the Methodist AME, a modest wood-frame building with a gabled slate roof and a shingled turret out of whose tip rose a gold-leaf cross, one which Jake Daugherty, Pap’s father, maintained. The church’s display case, enclosed by a glass door, announced in white plastic letters, “Death, Where Be Thy Sting? by Samuel Hochner, Rev.” Less than a city block down the street, a similar Regent Theatre display case read, “On A Wing And A Prayer.” The price for admission was so inexpensive it mattered little to most patrons what was playing.

Pennsylvania Avenue ran perpendicular off Long Avenue. A single-story Baptist church sitting on one corner suggested its parishioners were less well-off than Reverend Hochner’s flock up on Long Avenue. In fact, the farther away you journeyed from Hebron’s Diamond, the less grand and monumental the houses of worship became. This Baptist sanctuary looked as if it could have been a mechanic’s garage but for its lime-white doors, the celluloid purple paper adorning its windows, and a makeshift crucifix nailed up against the eaves over the doorway. It, too, had a bulletin board, but this was a simple affair hanging off a hook at the entrance, with a paper tacked to it broadcasting, “Sin and Mary’s Burden, Preacher Billy Leech. Pancakes & Sausage Following.”

Across the street a creek rippled out of a culvert and spread a car-length’s wide to flow alongside Pennsylvania Avenue, which by now had turned to gravel. Beyond the stream and to our left stood a Federalist mansion on a rise overlooking the swift and brackish water. No visible bridge crossing or roadway led into this house, once quite magnificent, but now with several of its upstairs windows gone, and gauze curtains flying out over the porch roof.

Shoeless children attired only in underpants raced sinisterly in and out of the house, its door wide open to a black interior. Two teenage girls (we guessed they were all siblings) ran down to the water’s edge, taunting Westley and me to join them. The oldest, boyishly gaunt, flashed an obscenity while provocatively snapping her sister’s dress above her head—she was stark naked.

“Do you suppose that’s 1648?” Westley asked.

The address we were seeking stood directly across the street, a white clapboard-sided bungalow with a small front porch and a suggestion of a second story. A 1932 Chevrolet Coupe sedan sat in its driveway.

“Are you sure this is the place?” I asked.

“If it ain’t, we got nothing to worry about. You go first,” Westley said. “You’re the oldest.”

“What are we going to say? ‘Hi! We’re the Daugherty boys’?”

“How about, ‘Hello, we’re your grandsons.’”

“What if they . . . I mean what in the hell will we call them if they let us in?”

“Maybe we should just go home,” Westley said.

I pushed him up the porch stairs and knocked. Soon a curtain in the window of the door levitated, baring a pair of nut-brown eyes. Dumb, we stood looking down at our cheap shoes. Then I wondered if we should take the old man’s admonishment seriously, and blurted out:

“Do you think Grandma and Grandpa are home, brother Westley?”

Westley began to laugh uncontrollably, like when he farted in church. The main door squeaked open. On the other side of the storm door stood a heavy-set girl of serious mien.

“Whadya want?”

“The Daugherty boys,” Westley piped up like it was something to be proud of.

“What?” she yelled.

“The Daugherty boys. Katherine and Joe’s sons.”

“Oh.” And she just stood there, gaping, delight now spreading like a red shadow across her moon face. “You mean Westley and James?”

Our mouths both dropped.

“Yes!” I answered happily.

“I’m Jenny,” she said, opening the door wide. “We’re cousins. Come on in.”

A gold-leaf framed daguerreotype of a black horse stalking a white horse faced us as we entered the room. The white horse slanted her neck back towards the pursuing stallion with an air of submission. Crocheted antimacassars lay draped over the backs of a mohair sofa and chairs, upholstered in a soot-black and umber geometric pattern. Floor lamps sat on opposite ends of the sofa, orange marble and brass affairs with grand silk canopy-like shades many sizes too large. Miniature light bulbs underneath the marbled inlaid bases of these lamps provided the scarce illumination in the living room. The blind and drapes on the single window had been drawn closed.

On out into the kitchen we shadowed Jenny.

A gray-haired lady in a chemise, her neck jeweled by a large silver and pearl brooch, sat next to a table and bank of windows through which shafts of a pollen-filled sunlight swirled. A butcher’s apron stopped short of her hosiery, garter-rolled just under her knees. I saw and smelled flour on her large hands and beefy arms, on her jowled cheeks and about her mouth where it powdered a mustache. Flour dust fogged the glass cupboards. It lay a thin film across the table and chairs and linoleum floor. It splotched her felt slippers like baker’s rain.

“Grandma,” Jenny exclaimed, “these are Aunt Katy’s sons!”

The old woman supported her heavy body with her hands against the oaken table, stood up and shambled across the floor toward us, great handfuls of flesh hanging off her triceps. A flour-pocked, safety-pin-secured eminence slipping toward Westley and me, this flour lady, this massive maternal gathering of bone and flesh sliding her diabetic body across the linoleum to an embrace.

And we were sorely ashamed.

She pressed each of our heads to her breasts; they radiated a tantalizing odor that she left behind on every chair in which she sat. Even after she died, her odor lingered on the walls and chairs of that house for years. We’d been held by women before, but this woman gave off an odor like earth after winter thaw. A distinct, unwomanly odor. No sex here. On Katy Daugherty we could detect a variety of scents that came out of peculiarly colored bottles on top of her bureau. (Out of the ink-blue vial, one so provocative it caused me to experience a profound sense of loss when she dabbed it behind her ears.) But this massive sliding soul was a sweetness at the edge of sour.

And as she wept, clutching our heads like Mason jars confining fireflies and dandelions against her fleshy breasts, we began to melt before cousin Jenny. The brave Daugherty boys, whose father’s sister was a burlesque queen, whose brother was a circus tramp, whose younger brother was a pious, mean-spirited, selfish-prick Monsignor of the old man’s once-a-Catholic-always-a-Catholic Church.

I looked down at my hands, as she didn’t seem to want to let go for a while longer. They, too, looked splotched as if by rain. Under a woodshed in a summer storm. In this place. The taunting girls with no clothes under their dresses across the creek could by no worldly means draw us away.

What in Christ’s name could ever have gone so wrong?

II

Myra Coleridge took Westley and me by the hand and walked us toward the back door out into her stockade-fence-enclosed backyard.

“Jenny, take the boys out to meet Grandpa.”

“Oh, Gramps, come on out here!” Jenny ran towards the garage.

Several dogs leapt barking out of the garage and raced towards us. Grandma stamped her slippered foot against the stone path. The animals darted under the rabbit hutches, panting and wagging their tails. Everything became quiet.

Rupert Coleridge stepped into the afternoon light.

He walked deliberately over to the chicken house, tossing two handfuls of corn onto the hard earthen floor. Out of the miniature gabled-roof and columned-porch house several brilliantly feathered cocks strutted. He turned to study us.

A body of slight stature dressed in black, high shoes, a pair of gray woolen trousers held tightly up against his crotch by button suspenders over a matching short-sleeve shirt whose single breast pocket displayed several fountain pens fastened tightly against his chest. He wore a leather bow tie, too. A costume worn by a mortician’s helper, the man who chauffeured old Packard hearses with the remaining dowagers through the center of Hebron.

Grandpa Rupert’s head was small, with concave cheeks and deep-set onyx eyes, like windows under eaves. Bushy zinc-colored eyebrows. Like Jacob Daugherty, his hair was untamed and parted down the middle. But unlike Jacob, Rupert Coleridge had one outstanding distinguishing characteristic. Even from where Westley and I stood, it was painfully evident: a scar the width of a strip of bacon etched his forehead. It showed jaundiced in the sun, as if somebody once had taken a razor-sharp chisel and lifted off Rupert’s bony forehead a flesh shaving, then ineptly stitched that strip of skin-bacon onto the left side of his nose.

For that is where in Jesus’s name it wound up.

Half of Grandpa’s nose came off his forehead. It, too, was a sick, mustardy hue. We could hear him sucking air forcefully through his nostrils from where we stood, almost snorting, same as the pony that stood roped in the shed next to the rabbit hutches. When we got close enough to him, the prosthetic half-nose would get some color in the yellow when he snorted forcefully—like red in a dying ochre sky.

“Pap, these are Katherine’s boys.”

“Oh?”

Pulling air up into his head, he reached out his right hand. On its back side was yet another scar like the one on his forehead. The hand was grease stained, and after seeing it, he withdrew it, commenting: “After all these years Katy don’t want me to send her boys home dirty.” He stopped at the rooster pen.

Jenny ran into the garage and returned with a coffee can full of seed corn. He poured us each a handful. The roosters had returned to their miniature house. Grandpa Rupert sounded chicken noises as he gestured for us to toss the corn into their enclosure.

“My babies. You boys know what these are?”

“Chickens,” offered Westley.

“Chickens you eat,” he scolded. “Whadayer names?”

“He’s James. I’m Westley.”

“I once seen you when you were babies. Didn’t even know your names.”

Both of us fidgeted.

“On a hot summer Friday night these chickens take in more money than your daddy do in a week. Cocks, boys. Fighting cocks. Each one of them is a killer.”

He led us into his garage. A 1938 Plymouth convertible coupe with a rumble seat stood wheel-less on blocks. Its top was down and the single seat had been re-upholstered in a glossy green imitation leather. The garage’s only source of illumination was a single small window looking back toward the kitchen; a trouble light still burned under the car’s chassis. Near the driver’s door lay a board onto which he’d bolted a pair of roller skates.

“I bet both of you boys would like to drive her, huh?”

A pair of fender skirts with emblems of silver comets and red reflector eyes lay against the garage wall.

“What are you doing with it?” I asked.

“Its transmission’s shot. You boys know anything about cars?”

We didn’t.

“Your daddy ain’t taught you how to fix cars?”

“No sir.”

“What do you do when yours gets broke?”

“He takes it to the gas station,” Westley said.

“Costs money, huh?”

We shrugged our shoulders.

“Can’t afford that down here on Pennsylvania Avenue. Rabbits just ain’t for Easter, you know. Taste a lot like chicken.” He slid under the Plymouth on the roller skates. “We fix what goes broke.”

Westley and I stood in the dark staring at each other.

“How old are you, James?”

“Near sixteen.”

“What’s your daddy been teaching you?”

It was now becoming more uncomfortable in the dark and gasoline-impregnated interior. Periodically Grandfather Rupert would skate out from under the coupe on his back, retrieving another wrench out of the many buckets of tools he kept about the car’s periphery, then disappear again.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.

“I seen him, you know?” He skated out once again, lifted his head in the glow of the trouble light and spoke: “Damn near every Friday night up at Keefe’s Café in Hebron. He ever tell you?”

Both of us shook our heads.

“Always seems to be with one of his chickens.”

He slid back under the chassis, chortling. He clanged one of his crescent wrenches against the transmission housing, for it sounded like the starting bell for the cock fight, then rolled triumphantly out from under the convertible, smiling widely at us in the darkness, reaching out both his hands to us, the scarred one and the one that weren’t scarred, and beckoning us to lift him off the litter.

“Look here, boys,” his coal-black eyes glinting under the bony eaves of his forehead, “I don’t mean no disrespect to your father. I just ain’t ever stomached how he’s been treating your ma. Your old man strutting around downtown Hebron like he were one of those sportin’ bankers on the North Hill, fancy layin’ rags and shoes and spendin’ all his money on women and drink . . . . Well, it just been cankerin’ away in my stomach.

“But they”—he gestured toward the house—“ain’t ever permitted me to speak.” Grandpa put his bony arms about each our waists. I stood almost a head taller than both him and Westley. We walked back towards the house. At the kitchen he stopped and lifted a black leather change purse out of his trouser pocket, snapped it open and withdrew a roll of currency secured by a rubber band, peeling off ten one-dollar bills to each of us.

“Welcome home.”

He placed his soiled hands on each our heads. The hands felt dry, bony, tightly wrapped, unlike Grandmother’s, but nevertheless alive, and I could feel the grease-stained palm prints on my cheeks. A proud scar that I would infuse with crimson as Westley and I walked back to our house, miles away, never bothering to spend our ten one-dollar bills. Holding them in our pockets, smelling of gasoline and crankcase oil, and the sour-sweet odor of Grandma’s flour embrace—carrying these odors and chimera back to our house, place of marital barrenness, whose mystery or death we never fully understood.

But now at least each of us had a place to which we could repair.

III

We didn’t have a garage like Grandpa Coleridge’s. Ours contained a sofa whose springs had exploded, a rusted wringer washer and a Westinghouse mangle. An oak porch swing lay in its center, the eye hooks having pulled out of the decaying porch rafters one summer day when Mother and ailing Aunt Evelyn swung a late afternoon, watching the traffic race up and down Cascade street. When the swing collapsed, plummeting the two sisters to the porch floor, their legs shot out before them like wooden pegs. The cars continued to whiz past.

Evelyn began to laugh, exclaiming, “Katy. My goddamn swing’s broken, too.”

“Nonsense,” Mother replied. “He didn’t screw big enough ones in. If I’d done it in the first place, we wouldn’t be sitting here on our sweet ones now. Let’s hang the goddamn thing back up, set a cold beer on it, and wait ’til he comes home. Seein’ him fly ass over tin cups in his fancy duds, it’d be worth it, wouldn’t you say, Evy?”

Aunt Evelyn was now on her feet, trembling. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to see him get hurt.”

“Hurt!” Mother humphed, dragging the swing down off the steps and across the lawn towards the garage.

The black lacquered rocking chair with its cornflower stencils leaning to one side in its dark corner, for instance. That was the most telling symbol for her of how things had gone awry. It sat out there crippled for several years. One day I saw her dragging it toward our neighbors, Johnny and Mary Wazlinski. “If Johnny can repair it, it’s yours, Mary,” she said. Johnny, a welder’s apprentice, took a scrap half-inch steel rod, heating it with a torch so it curved into the shape of a rocker, then welded two brackets down into which the chair’s legs could sit. He sprayed the rocking contraption flat black. It worked fine, but much noisier now, and cut a trough in Mary’s hardwood floor. She lay a piece of heavy carpet under it, claiming the Windsor rocker was the nicest piece of furniture she’d ever owned.

“Mother, what do you think of it?” I asked in private.

“Johnny fixed it for her. Ain’t what your father did.” Then added, “But it does look like a chair with a prosthesis.”

When the old man finally saw it several days later, he said, “Maybe you should’ve had Johnny fix your rocker years earlier, Katherine. ’Cepting you’d have to sew it a skirt to cover that nasty leg.”

“It looks far better with Mary sitting rockin’ in it than it did out there with the hubcaps and the Westinghouse.”

“Katherine, if I’d jury-rigged a leg up like that and brought it in here, why, you know what you would have done?”

“You’ve ain’t never given me a chance, Joe Daugherty.”

She was right. He’d astonish her now and then. But his surprises were ones she always feared he might spring on her.

“Boys, don’t let on to your mother I’m telling you this.” Father had huddled us down in the cellar out of Mother’s earshot one dusk shortly after our south side visit.

“The old bastard is a convict,” he whispered.

“A convict!” blurted Westley.

“Shhhh. Sweet Grandad. Did you like that big scar on his forehead? That nose that looks like a change purse patched with a piece of leather? How the old bastard snorts up through it, his left eye twitching like a warning light? He’s some piece, ain’t he?”

Neither of us said a word.

“Well, you think what you want about him. What’d he do? Pay you both off? Don’t go in any of the stores on the south side sayin’ you’re related to old Rupert and Myra Coleridge; the proprietor will chase both your asses back out onto the street. That little banshee’s a certified convict: Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.”

“What are you telling us?” I asked.

“Daddy Rupert had to leave town, go ‘down south,’ for several years to have his nose taken care of.” He laughed sardonically when he saw we were reading him. “Well, that ain’t the truth. Your ma’s old man worked for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Right down in the freight yards in Mahoningtown near the roundhouse, he and your grandmother’s sister’s husband, George, both switchmen. They hitched up a scheme one night. Several boxcars of goods they’d eased over to the rail siding alongside a fence borderin’ the freight yards. Had their accomplices pull up on the outside of the fence after midnight with several dump trucks idling, while George and Rupert unsealed the two boxcars and threw all the freight stored inside over the fence to their accomplices. They worked through the night. Come daylight, the boxcars were broom clean.

“Dime store notions, kitchen utensils, pots and pans, dry goods, and a rich load of liquor—damn near half a boxcar’s worth. The thieves all met the next day in a deserted warehouse to fence the loot, but old Rupert banjo-eyed one lot of black suits and men’s dress shoes.

“That’s just how the little snortin’ sonofabitch got caught.”

The pony mocked Grandpa’s snorting in its shed that day, too.

“The black shoes looked like the kind bankers wore, huh, plain but with rich-looking leather laces? The suits were all one size, as were the shit kickers. Old Rupert took one set of clothes for himself, then had cousin Jenny walk up and down Pennsylvania Avenue gifting the remainder, explainin’ to the Mrs. of the house: ‘Pap Coleridge won a couple of suits with shoes in a contest in a raffle over at Lima, Ohio. A little of your tailoring, and maybe the mister would like it free?’ But the next Sabbath, Grandaddy, along with several of his neighbors, promenaded Pennsylvania Avenue wearing the purloined black suits and banker’s shoes like low-water dignitaries, and walking back from the Baptist church just up the street, they got caught in an unexpected downpour. The black suit jackets held up just fine; but the pants lost their body and clung like shit-paper to the men’s knees and thighs. Worse, the soles peeled right off their fancy banker’s shoes like box tops.

“Grandpa Rupert and Uncle George were nabbed cold.

“Corpse wrappers, clothes undertakers dress stiffs in. The dress jacket had to be real. But the pants? Good enough if the widow looked under the tufted satin to ascertain her deceased was wearing trousers. Who gave a shit they were paper? But the items of clothing that put your grandfather and mother’s uncle in the cooler were the fucking cardboard-soled shoes.”

Katy began rattling the supper dishes overhead.

Pap wasn’t about to break his rhythm. “When the drenched neighbors finally got into their houses, their shoe uppers were still tied and intact but the soles and heels had dropped somewhere between their homes and the Baptist church. Hebron Chronicle reported next day that nine pairs of cadaver shoes were among the loot. The dead don’t walk,’ one of Rupert’s benefactor’s swore.

“A federal crime to steal from the railroads, boys.”

“James! Come upstairs to wash up. Westley . . .” Mother called.

Father lowered his voice to a whisper. “Jail doctors discovered his nose cancer and cut the bad part away like you’d scoop rot from a peach, then shaved off a piece of his forehead to create his change-purse sniffer. Your mother’s always been lied to that her old man was recuperating in a St. Louis hospital.

“The little banshee convict of Pennsylvania Avenue’s a mean ’n sneaky little prick. That smile that he’s giving you is as phony as those cadaver skins.”

By now night had penetrated the cellar. Only the streetlight cast an ochre blade across our old man’s face. He seemed proud he’d driven his story home. Westley and me stayed seated while Father went outside and rolled his 1936 Dodge sedan out of the driveway. In the blackness we dreamed of a banshee convict roller skating under the chassis of ours.