“I don’t hear you,” the boy on his right says.
“Thank you.” To Edwin’s horror, it comes out a sob though he’s fairly certain he’s not crying. He puts his hands over his face just in time to block the first punch. The second hits his shoulder. He takes a kick in the shin that buckles his leg out from under him. He falls onto the pile of broken foils and remains there, curled up like a dead leaf, his hands over his eyes, his shin a sheet of pain. Someone kicks him in the back.
A sharp, loud whistle. It’s George Stout of the Bully Boys, arriving on the scene, whistling for reinforcements. George doesn’t wait. “Leave him be,” George shouts, wading in, landing punches right and left. The big boy with the freckles hits the ground hard.
More Bully Boys arrive—Theodore Hamilton, Stuart Robson, William O’Laughlen, trailed by his little brother, Michael. Even Michael has more fight in him than Edwin. The battle moves down the street and into an alleyway. The noise of it fades. Edwin doesn’t follow to see how it ends.
He stands. He tests his leg and finds it working. He leaves, scooping up the broken foils, walking the way anyone escaping from a thrashing and on his way to a scolding would walk. He doesn’t look to see if Johnny is about.
He’d hoped to delay Mother’s knowledge of the foils, but by the time he arrives, Johnny has already raced home and told the whole story. It seems that George triumphed. Johnny is quite elated by the whole thing. Victory to the Bully Boys!
But also embarrassed. “He just stands there and lets people hit him,” Edwin overhears him telling Rosalie. “The only fight he’ll ever win is a pretend one. And even then, he’ll only pretend to win it.
“When someone hits him, he cries!”
How amazed Edwin would be to know that as an old man, he will look back on these days with longing. My wonderful childhood, he’ll think. My short and wonderful childhood.
iii
Father arrives at last and in such an excellent mood that the decision not to tell him about the foils is mutually made without a word being spoken. He kisses the girls, returns to kiss them again. Little Joe is tossed into the air. He even helps carry the food to the table for dinner, doing an impression of a Negro servant that gives Asia the hiccoughs, she laughs so hard. The children stand behind their chairs until Father has taken his place.
Dinner with Father is a one-man show. His abhorrence of the theatrical life is much less persuasive than the glamour he casts with every word, every gesture. Tonight he tells tales of Sam Houston, the wild man of the frontiers, intimate of the Cherokee, hero of the battle of San Jacinto, governor, orator, and senator. Edwin looks across the table, hoping to catch Johnny’s eye. They’ve heard these tales so often—if there be nothing new, but that which is Hath been before—but Johnny doesn’t notice him and Edwin actually loves these old stories.
Sam Houston dressed like an Indian. Sam Houston’s near mortal wounds. Sam Houston’s broken heart. There are few men Father admires as much and once, long ago, Houston was his closest friend. Like himself, Father says, Houston has mind. He points to his own forehead.
He tells them how, in a fit of despair, Houston determined one day to do himself in. How his hand was stayed by the sudden appearance of an eagle. ‘‘‘A spirit messenger,’ is how the Cherokee tell it. Old Sam’s a great friend to the Indian—speaks the language fluently, which few white men can do. He even has a tribal name—Col-lon-neh. That means the Raven.” Father is wiping his plate clean with a piece of bread.
Around the time Father knew Houston best, around the time they were riding the steamboats on the Mississippi, tearing up the saloons together, regaling the audience on the stools with inebriated extemporaneous speeches on liberty inspired by Homer and Shakespeare, the Cherokee changed Houston’s name from the Raven to Big Drunk. Father doesn’t tell them that part. Nor how comical the Cherokee found them, tiny Father in his flowered waistcoat and brass buttons, hulking Houston in his blanket and sombrero, stumbling drunkenly along the streets, roaring their politics and their poetry.
Without these details, it all sounds grand. Edwin thinks that he would also like a Cherokee name. Obviously, the Cherokee won’t give him one. He’ll have to do that himself. Obviously, it won’t be in Cherokee since Col-lon-neh is the only Cherokee word he knows. But it can’t be in English. Maybe Hebrew? How would you say “the Raven” in Hebrew? Father will know.
Father has moved on to Andrew Jackson, another one-time friend, dead now almost two years. This leads to a brief Byronic melancholy:
Let my pure flame of Honour shine in story,
When I am cold in death—and the slow fire,
That wears my vitals now, will no more move me
Than ’twould a corpse within a monument.
The bit elided in this account is the letter he wrote during his old friend’s presidency, calling him a damned scoundrel and threatening to cut his throat as he slept. Possibly he was joking. The Cherokee have a special name for Jackson, too—they call him the Indian Killer. This also goes unsaid.
Father soon cheers up again, complimenting Rosalie on the leeks and potatoes, which she did not cook, Mother on the fish. Yes, fish! Suddenly Father, who once thought it murder to eat an oyster, has decided they should all be eating fish. None of the children like fish, so this is nothing to celebrate. Plus Rosalie has told Edwin how Father once said that he’d killed Mary Ann and Elizabeth by eating meat, so Edwin wonders which of them is being put at risk this time on account of a cod he doesn’t even want.
Himself, of course. He looks up from his plate to see Father gazing at him fondly. “I’ve made a decision about our Ned,” Father says. He leans back in his chair, drawing it out. “Momentous.” He is all twinkle and trill. At last he gets to it. “Ned will be a cabinetmaker.”
This is a shot to the heart.
“He’s very skilled with his hands,” Father says genially, obviously believing Edwin will be pleased with the compliment and the plan. “Look how quickly he picked up the banjo.”
Edwin knows three chords at most, can play five tunes. He has always, always wanted to be an actor and everyone knows this. One of his early memories is of sitting with Mother in Father’s dressing room, asking her what that sound was, the thunder four thousand people make when they all clap their hands at the same time.
Father dislikes being opposed, so Edwin says nothing, even as his dreams cry out in their dying. The more Father talks of it, the more fixed it will become.
Edwin doesn’t expect Mother to argue with Father. She never has. She never will. All he expects of her is silence. Silence, and maybe, after Father has quit the room, sympathy. Instead, his mother speaks. “Jesus was a carpenter,” she says.
Now Edwin is so angry he can hardly swallow. As if Jesus is remembered for his woodwork! “June gets to be an actor,” he says throatily.
It’s enough resistance to set Father off. His hands smack down on the table, making the plates rattle. He begins to rail about the sacrifices he makes, the long hard touring, the exhausting falsity of it all. “All so that you can have a real life,” he says. “What pleasure you will take in making something fine, something you can touch and smell and see, the product of your own hands. I envy you, by God I do.”