Nobody's Son
by Michael Wolfe
A thin, crisp breeze passed swiftly through 5 Turner Alley, carrying with it the whisper of winter and a promise that temperatures in eastern Iowa would soon dip and then drop, stay dropped and then deepen. Nan Wood set the table in rare form, describing the unfortunate outfits Margaret Schumacher had squeezed her poor children into for church that morning, all brown, all matching, and so tight that one of them had turned red as bloody beefsteak when Nan caught him staring at her breasts.
“And then he just collapsed!” Nan said, placing a bowl of warm rolls on the table. “A big, brown lump. His two sisters stood still as statues as he lay there all but dead between them with his hands covering his crotch. A complete and total freak show, those kids.”
“Oh, the poor thing,” Hattie said, as her own grown children laughed. “Was he OK?”
“Not until I kicked him,” Nan said.
“Please tell me with the good lord as witness you did not. Not the sweet daughter I raised.”
“I couldn’t exactly kneel down in my skirt in the present company,” Nan said. “I only nudged him with the toe of my shoe—to see if he was still alive.” She smirked at Grant, who was usually the one to bring such antics to their meals. “And when I held out my hand to help him up he wouldn’t take it! He just rose to his feet hunched over with his eyes closed, squeezing them so hard you’d have thought he was passing a kidney stone, and his sisters followed suit and shut theirs, and they marched right off like that, all three of them, like a troop of little blind windup dolls bumping into everybody and everything as they hobbled towards the exit.”
“This is precisely why one should always and never go to church,” Grant said, who was currently on a ten-year hiatus and counting.
“Why’s that?” Hattie said.
“It’s so full of freaks. And freakish miracles.”
“They didn’t even acknowledge me!” Nan said, untying her apron and taking a seat at the table.
As soon as they’d bowed their heads to say grace, which Hattie was poised to say—the soft linen on the heels of their clasped hands, brushing their thighs, the warmth of the open oven hovering and settling into their hair and clothes—a sudden knocking came from the studio door.
They exchanged bemused looks. No one had heard a thing before the sound, not one creak from the steps outside. Their landlord, Mr. Turner, always called out from beside the garage door where he kept the hearses before grabbing hold of the railing and nearly tearing it down as he huffed up the stairs—the cane thump, the railing creak like a stubborn nail being pulled, then two thuds as his feet steadied again on each step. Friends came by unannounced, but never at supper time and never without a car pulling in first or voices from below causing Turner’s dog Beauregard to start his psycho-yowling. And there’d been more busybodies hovering in all of their lives ever since American Gothic had placed in the annual art show in Chicago, catapulting Grant’s status overnight, but most all of them had had the decency to keep their distance and gape blankly from the sidewalk until Grant made his way out to greet them.
“Who is it?” Grant said.
The answer was inaudible from where they sat, though the voice most certainly belonged to a young man. Grant set his napkin beside his plate, stood up, and made for the door.
“Who’s there?” he said as he got closer, but this time there was no response at all.
As soon as he pulled the door curtain aside and looked out the door’s window, the young man outside knocked again, right against Grant’s face.
“Who is it?” Nan asked.
“Oh nobody,” he said, holding a finger up to the window and then bending down and pulling on his shoes. “Go ahead and start. I won’t be long.”
He cracked the door and slid out quickly, as if not to let in a blistering cold, and both women at the table, hands still folded in prayer, stared through the crack for any kind of detail.
“It looked like a young kid,” Hattie said. “I couldn’t tell who.”
“It wasn’t Arnold, was it?” Nan said. “I couldn’t see anything either.”
“I don’t think so. He always says hello. And he’s never come at such an off time. Might be one of his students.”
They stared at their meals quietly, listening carefully for voices as the two men made their way down the stairs, but the only sounds were of the old lived-in studio and the men’s shoes on the wooden steps, the creaky railing, a passing car.
Outside, Grant folded his arms across his stomach. A thick musk-fire band lay across the bottom of the sky, braided between houses and elm trees and utility poles. The gold frame of his eyeglasses still held a dull shimmer in the setting sunlight. He squinted slightly and watched as the boy-man searched his eyes. Grant glanced next door to make sure his landlord wasn’t looking, and then back at the young man, whose face seemed free of worry. He was just a kid with a mismatched mustache, something that belonged to someone else.
In a loud whisper, Grant said, “You’ve no right to be here. Please leave.”
“We have an important matter to discuss,” the boy said.
There was an abnormal sense of comfort about the boy, like maybe he intended to stay a while. It was almost as if he’d been invited.
Grant raised his voice. “I have a plate of warm food and a family upstairs waiting for me to join them. Who are you, anyway?”
“Who am I?” he said. “Are you serious?” Now he mocked, taunted. “Who am I?”
Grant tightened the hold on his midsection as if he were ill or cold, then looked down at the boy’s shoes, which were gray and grubby and looked wet even though it hadn’t rained in well over a week. His dark pants and white button-down shirt had been recently pressed, though. Grant had meant to say, “Who do you think you are?” but he always got tight when he was nervous, and the first thing to go, every damn time, was his words. He couldn’t decide whether or not it was chilly yet, if winter had in fact come through. He couldn’t conceive of where all this kid had been, either.
“I just discovered who my birth mother is, down at the courthouse, because I turned eighteen last week and they let me in to see my records. And I found out who my father is, too, and I think you’ll be interested in the results. They concern you.”
Grant pulled out a matchbook and a tin of cigarettes from his front pocket, popped the tin lid, and placed a cigarette between his lips. He struck a match and took a drag, blew a ghost of smoke beside the boy’s head. He resembled Grant’s assistant Arnold. They had the same nose or something. Hair, maybe. He could have been one of Arnold’s friends or cousins for all Grant knew.
“Have we met before?” Grant said. “Do I know you?”
“You might not believe me but it don’t matter. I’m your son. I’ve got the paperwork to prove it.”
“Oh the good god damn you are,” Grant said, half-laughing, then pointing at the street and walking the kid back a few steps. “Why don’t you beg off and go scam someone else. How’d you get this address, anyway?”
“You’re not exactly hard to find.” The boy planted himself in the middle of the yard, halfway between Grant’s garage studio and Turner’s funeral home. “Listen, I need you to please just listen to me. I’m eighteen. I grew up here in Cedar Rapids, but I was adopted. I live out by Marion, over on Indian Creek. I found out some things recently and it turns out I’m your son. So I come to inform you and collect what’s mine.”
“I don’t know who’s put you up to this, but if you don’t leave right now I’ll walk straight over to that funeral home there and phone the police.”
“You go right ahead. I’ll tell them the truth. I ain’t got nothing to hide. And I’ll call my friend at The Gazette, too, and tell him everything. Then everyone’ll know.”
“Know what? That you’ve got your facts wrong? That you’re out of your mind? That there’s no conceivable way that I could have had a child in this lifetime? Now if you would, I’m going to rejoin my family for supper. It would behoove you to make off this property and never come back here again.”
“I can tell them about that day you stopped to talk to me on the side of the road just outside of Waubeek. The one you’re always painting on. How about that?”
The boy had gotten louder and was roaming now around the yard, which was covered in crisp leaves. “Can’t you see it?” He threw his arms up and presented the sky to both of them. “Iowa’s Golden Boy Exposes Himself to Local Teenager. ‘American Gothic’ Painter Paints Himself Pink.”
“You have got to keep it down,” Grant said between his teeth, “and leave here right now.”
“You want me to shut up? You want me gone?” The boy held out a hand and lifted his chin to an angle perfect for punching. “Pay me.” And there was that something again that felt familiar to Grant, that rage inside of him that he had for his older brother that he could muster any time he thought about him long enough. Could the kid be a nephew he’d never met? He had Arnold’s high forehead and long cheeks. That was it: his cheeks. Grant’s memory failed him now, though, he couldn’t recall if he’d ever met the boy. Unless--
“I don’t have the sort of money you’re scheming after. I might be known but I’m just a farmer-artist. I live with my mom and sister. Up there.” He looked to the main window to make sure Nan wasn’t looking down on them and saw that it was still open. They’d no doubt heard something. He couldn’t tell if Turner’s windows were open as well, but he was never very far. Grant lowered his voice and spoke as if in confidence. An intimacy: “Fact of the matter is, you’ve come to the wrong place. We haven’t got a pot to piss in.”
The boy moved toward him and Grant stayed put. They were so close now that Grant was no longer there but in a lone cloud above a neighbor’s chimney, which looked, in the pre-twilight sky, like a severed head floating away from an oval body, a pig’s head, maybe, guillotined.
What if they’d all come back for him someday, with pitchforks and fury, demanding he owe them? The slow and steady march of the vengeful making their way towards him from all directions, circling in on him, narrowing all escapes. The one who wants his money, leading the charge. The one who wants his fame, close behind. And all along the periphery: the one who wants his job, the one who wants his attention, the one who wants his cock sucked, the one who wants to suck, the one who wants a commitment, the one who wants his friends, the one who wants another chance, the one who wants his talent, the one who wants to be held, the one who wants to save him, the one who wants his dad back.
Smoke tumbled out the neighbor’s chimney and settled between the pig’s severed head and body, filling in the gap, reattaching it to whole again. How was such a thing possible, he wondered as it drifted, morphed. Who would ever see such a thing again? Who, in fact, would ever believe him, and how could he possibly convince anyone of what was real or not?
The yelling came from all directions now. His sister, leaning out the door from above, making something up about how they needed his help with something, a lie that sounded like a lie as she yelled it for the entire block to hear, and then this boy in front of him, his face nearly in Grant’s chest, telling him if he didn’t hold his son then he’d ruin his career forever. And Turner’s dog, finally on the scene, howling over everyone with his front paws high up on one of the young man’s pantlegs.
“Aren’t you going to invite your son in for dinner? It’s the least you could do.” He petted Beauregard and then gently pushed him down with one hand, only for the dog to pop back up again. “Say it. Say son. I want to hear you call me your son.”
Now the pig cloud had disappeared completely. There was nowhere left for Grant to look but in the boy’s brown eyes.
“You’re nobody’s son around here.”
“I knew it. You’re just another part-time pansy. Back road fairy.”
The boy’s lip trembled and his face twitched. He stood still as Grant turned and made his way towards the stairs and on up to the studio. Before he opened the door, Grant looked down at the kid again, who hadn’t left the property, hadn’t even moved except to put his head down to scratch Beauregard’s ears and scruff. The top of the boy’s head was softer than the rest of him, glinting in the dark dusky light.
He was somebody’s son.
Turner appeared then out the back door of his house, and the three men formed an unlikely constellation with Grant at the top. The two older men caught eyes just before Grant re-entered the studio, and he gave his landlord a couple of nods to let him know everything was fine and resolved. He shut and locked the studio door behind him, took off his shoes, and rejoined his family at the table, ceding whatever was going to be said outside without him there.
Nan looked hard into him. His mother did, too. It felt like more and more, everyone wanted answers from him, like he could not have one conversation, paint one painting, take one afternoon drive without having to account for it.
“Well?” Nan said.
“Well what. I’m hungry.” He grabbed the basket of rolls even as two sat uneaten on his plate. He placed another one down beside them, cut into his square of meat pie with the side of his fork. He blew on it even though it had lost its heat, and then again as he held the fork in front of his mouth. “It was nothing. Just another farm waif looking for his ticket out of town.”
“You’ve never met him?”
“I haven’t the foggiest—”
“David really should put up a gate,” Hattie said. “I can’t imagine he likes having all these strangers showing up.”
“All? There’ve been five. Six,” Grant said, then put the forkful of food into his mouth.
“Don’t forget those ladies who barged right in here when we were eating,” Nan said. “And had the nerve to tell us to carry on.”
“Nobody wants to wait at a gate when they show up to a funeral home,” Grant said. “It’s hard enough to make that trip.”
“Well somebody needs to contain them,” Hattie said.
“You and all of your American Gothic boys,” Nan said. “What a sight for the bereaved.”
Grant slammed a fist onto the table. “You can stop right now,” he said, and they did, eating the rest of their meals listening only to silverware tap and slide across each other’s plates and teeth.
Once they’d finished, Grant was the first to get up.
“We forgot to say grace,” Hattie said. She looked gently at her son until he sat down and folded his hands on the table. They’d started saying grace after Maryville had died and Hattie brought them to a Presbyterian church in town instead of the Quaker meetinghouse in Whittier, but Grant had never taken to The Lord’s Prayer, he still preferred listening for the still quiet voice within.
“Our Father—” Hattie said, summoning one and sentencing another.
As inconceivable as it was, him siring a son, let alone at, what would he have had to have been, twenty-one? As far-fetched and delusional even, as it was, he let himself test the thought for a moment as he closed his eyes and listened to his sister and mother recite their prayer. Even though Maryville had been dead for nearly thirty years, he still thought of his dad all the time—everyone did—and pictured him now in the empty seat beside them. His father would have punished him outright and been done with it, not endlessly needle him, which somehow hurt worse.
After they cleared the table, Grant stepped back outside to smoke a cigarette. He sat on the top stair overlooking the spot in the yard where he’d stood with the young boy-man, filling his chest with slow drags and exhaling into the night sky as Nan washed dishes on the other side of the door.
He knew the road alright. Sometimes he visited the dead, and his dad, in the cemetery in Anamosa, whenever he needed a silence louder than the noise in his head, and he’d take the long route home. If he’d drunk too much the night before, he couldn’t tap in, couldn’t hear whatever was being communicated through that thin veil between life and death, between up here and down there (or was it always only here, all of it?).
Being near the body of his father comforted him, laying on the soil, pressing his ear to the ground like Maryville was trapped under ice and trying to say something to him. Grant didn’t know how to put it, or how to think it properly in a way that sounded and felt safe, but lately he thought maybe a part of him wanted to die. That it wouldn’t be the worst thing. That maybe there was something there on the other side, not like what they’d ministered at his father’s meetinghouse, and not what all the others in his mom’s family believed about angels and hellfire and saints, but some kind of love in being past all of it, being done with the judgment and the fear and the stress and the success, which was always just shy of enough, hovering instead in that calm space Maryville went to whenever he had looked out across the cornfields or closed his eyes in meeting for worship.
Grant had never forgotten the feeling of trying to fall asleep in a lighter house the night Maryville had traveled to another county to help a cousin of his for Threshing Day, where he stayed the night so they could get to work early the next morning. Something wasn’t right inside—a piece had gone missing. Not knowing when his father would return and not even really knowing where he was or why at the time, just that he wasn’t there and under the same roof, assuming he’d reappear in the morning at the kitchen table, where all things eventually came to reset—that’s the thought that finally got young Grant to sleep that night, that feeling of everyone in their right place at the table, all the seats filled, the last place they’d all be alive together.
Except Maryville didn’t return for an entire week, and the house got quieter and darker and the family grew more estranged, like a practice round for the real thing. Grant took to walking to the neighbors after school looking for his father, which was about as far as he could go without spooking himself or his mother. He kicked rocks at the edge of the neighbor’s drive and tried to look like he was just passing by, but no one just passed on by out there, not on their road. Before he knew it, he was trespassing. Belly-flat on the grass, laying alongside the Buchanans’ farmhouse in the late afternoon, inching his neck forward to peer into the basement windows as Sam Buchanan stood on a stepladder, carefully gluing pieces of a mast together on a giant model ship. The very scale of it was absurd, so large it would never make it out of the room, let alone up the stairs or out of the house, a ship too small for any significant body of water and too big to leave this place underground.
What was the point of making something no one would ever see?
Or building a vessel that couldn’t take you away.
Out here, everyone was looking for a way out—to the horizon, to God, to their teachers and down dirt roads as far as they could drive. Part of your plight, if you weren’t a doctor or a dentist or married to one, was looking for a way out.
During the week preceding Threshing Day that year on their own farm, when the days were still long and the evenings somehow longer, the fields lit up by the moon and the softened golden filter of hay it shone down on, the Wood boys played Hide-and-Seek among the shocks of hay, where Grant learned how to make himself invisible enough not to get caught, how to press his face into a shock and peer into it until everything went dark, inhaling the scent of his father and looking for any sign of a white fleck. The hay scratched his cheeks and eyelids and forehead and arms; it stung and poked and stabbed.
If it was still damp, it smelled like the wet parts inside their barn. Wet canvas and wood and earth. Maryville had always told them to keep an eye out for white spots and foul smells, in case one of them had started to rot from within, like was happening inside of Maryville’s heart now but which no one could see. Once it dried, it started smelling sweeter, more like corn, and that’s when it turned crisp, but not brittle. Bendable, but not breakable by hand. That’s when Grant knew the men would soon arrive, by the smell that preceded them, and it’s when his father would start to relax.
Darkness crept up slowly and then suddenly one night, and no one had answered Grant’s call when he yelled out for his brothers. He dashed for the house when he realized he was alone in the dark, only to find it locked once he got there. With his palms and face flattened against the windowpane of their side door, he started counting to himself, and when he reached one-hundred Mississippi, he turned to whispering through the door to his father, who he imagined was just on the other side of the kitchen, tending to the broken lamp beside his reading chair. Then, a carriage approached on the dirt road, its wheels crunching gravel as it slowed and made its way up their driveway. When Grant turned around, the light of a lantern illuminated his father’s face. A moment later, the door behind him unlocked and his two brothers ran out to greet their dad. He’d come home just in time for supper.
On Threshing Day, Maryville’s farmhand Slim arrived early and in a particularly good mood. He’d been around a lot more recently, working longer hours and helping Maryville on extra projects in the yard and on the house itself, not just in the barn and in the fields. He stood tall with dark hair and thick eyebrows twisted up like licorice, his forearms coursed with visible veins, and he moved around the farm—on a horse, in the fields, at the washbasin—like a man who didn’t have anything to prove. Every point of contact Slim had with the earth felt right to Grant, like he was doing what the lord had put him here to do, and there was no second-guessing in his face or in his shoulders, no dark cloud about him like the ones that regularly passed through Grant’s parents when the times were lean, which was always. He left as happy as he arrived each day, grateful for work and for companionship and for life. Grateful for God.
Slim had left him well enough alone most of that year, Grant too terrified to even let himself be seen by the older men but possessed enough by what they did and how they did it and what they emanated that he couldn’t help but get caught, dumb as an ox, staring straight ahead every damn time he did show his chubby ruddy face. His father didn’t really want him around anyway. Or so he thought. He was too awkward, couldn’t hardly open his mouth around an adult he wasn’t related to, and when he did, everything came out sideways and shrill or else got stuck in his throat as the words pooled inside him, needing squeezed out. And when they did tumble out, nobody could hardly hear him, anyhow.
As other men continued arriving, he watched Slim bend to pick up a bundle of golden wheat, the contours of his overalls darkening near his mid-section, a stab of sunlight on the side of his neck next to a kidney-shaped birthmark, his biceps filling out his shirt as he hugged the bundle and dragged it like a corpse to the threshing machine where a couple of men had positioned themselves, one to hand bunches to the other one, who would tear it apart into smaller chunks to feed into the machine.
Whenever all of the guys were there with his father, Grant saw what it was for Maryville to be the man with real sons. He saw the harmony as they worked together, the inherent language and connection they shared when not speaking, even the resemblance, somehow, in their appearances, despite Slim having a different hair color and build. Some of the guys had the same coveralls and boots. The younger ones, his older brother among them, were the walkers, catching the grain in burlap sacks as it fell out the bottom of the machine before walking it to the wagons.
When everything happened at once—one of the metal arms raised high shedding grain dust out into the air above them, steam shooting into the sky, and the big machine’s clanks and moans and hisses filling the space around them, men barking instructions to one another they couldn’t even hear as the machine continued gyrating before them—it snowed fresh dust, covering the men in gold.
Just as soon as he’d felt like one of those men, as soon as he’d looked hard enough and fell into the golden dream before his eyes and belonged, just one of the guys out there threshing wheat and working that earth over and if not manning then being near that big machine and all that power turning it out, getting it done, sucking on a loose piece of straw like the big boys and slowly getting covered in layers of grain dust and sweat and dirt like them big boys too, running a finger across his forehead to feel the grit and then feeling his whole face covered in it, licking the tip of his finger as the men in front of him, his brothers, wiped their faces with bandanas and rags, the forearms of their flannels, or their bare hands, the canvases of their lives already prepped, already layered with years of this same work, grit seeped so far into their bodies it would forever be a part of whatever happened next, forever their foundation, a smudged and weathered pigment—
Just as soon as he’d tasted their skin and bones, Slim caught him daydreaming near the side of the threshing machine and came over to tell him to keep his body facing them at all times, that he’d had his eye on him and wanted him to be safe. Slim rested a hand on Grant’s shoulder and squared his body with his own, then Grant heard him call him Son in a way that felt holy, the same feeling he’d had of the nearness of his father’s god once in meeting for worship when a visiting elder had lain a safe and steady hand on him in the hush of the cold and dim meetinghouse, and just as soon as the feeling reappeared, he prayed to that same god to let Slim’s hand stay there just a little bit longer, right there, just like that. All of it in an instant as the dust kept pouring down on them, as the great machine chug-a-lugged and jerked in the air behind Slim, as the sun flattened across the sky in an ochre smear, as the button on Slim’s overall clasp shined like the only real sun around, a blinding wink, the whole universe here in this moment on Slim’s chest and in the hand that had come down from above and touched him, a voice so soothing it hadn’t even made him swallow his words or stutter, he’d even said something back, just like that (was it dumb? Oh god, oh shit), and now a laugh between them (had he actually made him laugh? Or was he back in the world again, the one that laughed at him?), no sooner than this universe in miniature presented itself did the engine cut out in time for a call to come bellowing out from the house for everyone to hear.
“Grant, honey! Come now, we need you inside.”
His mom. The ladies. His fate.
He looked up at Slim who nodded approvingly, then he lowered his head and pivoted toward the house, but not because he’d been called. The moment he turned away from Slim, a shock of shame burst inside of him.
“And then he just collapsed!” Nan said, placing a bowl of warm rolls on the table. “A big, brown lump. His two sisters stood still as statues as he lay there all but dead between them with his hands covering his crotch. A complete and total freak show, those kids.”
“Oh, the poor thing,” Hattie said, as her own grown children laughed. “Was he OK?”
“Not until I kicked him,” Nan said.
“Please tell me with the good lord as witness you did not. Not the sweet daughter I raised.”
“I couldn’t exactly kneel down in my skirt in the present company,” Nan said. “I only nudged him with the toe of my shoe—to see if he was still alive.” She smirked at Grant, who was usually the one to bring such antics to their meals. “And when I held out my hand to help him up he wouldn’t take it! He just rose to his feet hunched over with his eyes closed, squeezing them so hard you’d have thought he was passing a kidney stone, and his sisters followed suit and shut theirs, and they marched right off like that, all three of them, like a troop of little blind windup dolls bumping into everybody and everything as they hobbled towards the exit.”
“This is precisely why one should always and never go to church,” Grant said, who was currently on a ten-year hiatus and counting.
“Why’s that?” Hattie said.
“It’s so full of freaks. And freakish miracles.”
“They didn’t even acknowledge me!” Nan said, untying her apron and taking a seat at the table.
As soon as they’d bowed their heads to say grace, which Hattie was poised to say—the soft linen on the heels of their clasped hands, brushing their thighs, the warmth of the open oven hovering and settling into their hair and clothes—a sudden knocking came from the studio door.
They exchanged bemused looks. No one had heard a thing before the sound, not one creak from the steps outside. Their landlord, Mr. Turner, always called out from beside the garage door where he kept the hearses before grabbing hold of the railing and nearly tearing it down as he huffed up the stairs—the cane thump, the railing creak like a stubborn nail being pulled, then two thuds as his feet steadied again on each step. Friends came by unannounced, but never at supper time and never without a car pulling in first or voices from below causing Turner’s dog Beauregard to start his psycho-yowling. And there’d been more busybodies hovering in all of their lives ever since American Gothic had placed in the annual art show in Chicago, catapulting Grant’s status overnight, but most all of them had had the decency to keep their distance and gape blankly from the sidewalk until Grant made his way out to greet them.
“Who is it?” Grant said.
The answer was inaudible from where they sat, though the voice most certainly belonged to a young man. Grant set his napkin beside his plate, stood up, and made for the door.
“Who’s there?” he said as he got closer, but this time there was no response at all.
As soon as he pulled the door curtain aside and looked out the door’s window, the young man outside knocked again, right against Grant’s face.
“Who is it?” Nan asked.
“Oh nobody,” he said, holding a finger up to the window and then bending down and pulling on his shoes. “Go ahead and start. I won’t be long.”
He cracked the door and slid out quickly, as if not to let in a blistering cold, and both women at the table, hands still folded in prayer, stared through the crack for any kind of detail.
“It looked like a young kid,” Hattie said. “I couldn’t tell who.”
“It wasn’t Arnold, was it?” Nan said. “I couldn’t see anything either.”
“I don’t think so. He always says hello. And he’s never come at such an off time. Might be one of his students.”
They stared at their meals quietly, listening carefully for voices as the two men made their way down the stairs, but the only sounds were of the old lived-in studio and the men’s shoes on the wooden steps, the creaky railing, a passing car.
Outside, Grant folded his arms across his stomach. A thick musk-fire band lay across the bottom of the sky, braided between houses and elm trees and utility poles. The gold frame of his eyeglasses still held a dull shimmer in the setting sunlight. He squinted slightly and watched as the boy-man searched his eyes. Grant glanced next door to make sure his landlord wasn’t looking, and then back at the young man, whose face seemed free of worry. He was just a kid with a mismatched mustache, something that belonged to someone else.
In a loud whisper, Grant said, “You’ve no right to be here. Please leave.”
“We have an important matter to discuss,” the boy said.
There was an abnormal sense of comfort about the boy, like maybe he intended to stay a while. It was almost as if he’d been invited.
Grant raised his voice. “I have a plate of warm food and a family upstairs waiting for me to join them. Who are you, anyway?”
“Who am I?” he said. “Are you serious?” Now he mocked, taunted. “Who am I?”
Grant tightened the hold on his midsection as if he were ill or cold, then looked down at the boy’s shoes, which were gray and grubby and looked wet even though it hadn’t rained in well over a week. His dark pants and white button-down shirt had been recently pressed, though. Grant had meant to say, “Who do you think you are?” but he always got tight when he was nervous, and the first thing to go, every damn time, was his words. He couldn’t decide whether or not it was chilly yet, if winter had in fact come through. He couldn’t conceive of where all this kid had been, either.
“I just discovered who my birth mother is, down at the courthouse, because I turned eighteen last week and they let me in to see my records. And I found out who my father is, too, and I think you’ll be interested in the results. They concern you.”
Grant pulled out a matchbook and a tin of cigarettes from his front pocket, popped the tin lid, and placed a cigarette between his lips. He struck a match and took a drag, blew a ghost of smoke beside the boy’s head. He resembled Grant’s assistant Arnold. They had the same nose or something. Hair, maybe. He could have been one of Arnold’s friends or cousins for all Grant knew.
“Have we met before?” Grant said. “Do I know you?”
“You might not believe me but it don’t matter. I’m your son. I’ve got the paperwork to prove it.”
“Oh the good god damn you are,” Grant said, half-laughing, then pointing at the street and walking the kid back a few steps. “Why don’t you beg off and go scam someone else. How’d you get this address, anyway?”
“You’re not exactly hard to find.” The boy planted himself in the middle of the yard, halfway between Grant’s garage studio and Turner’s funeral home. “Listen, I need you to please just listen to me. I’m eighteen. I grew up here in Cedar Rapids, but I was adopted. I live out by Marion, over on Indian Creek. I found out some things recently and it turns out I’m your son. So I come to inform you and collect what’s mine.”
“I don’t know who’s put you up to this, but if you don’t leave right now I’ll walk straight over to that funeral home there and phone the police.”
“You go right ahead. I’ll tell them the truth. I ain’t got nothing to hide. And I’ll call my friend at The Gazette, too, and tell him everything. Then everyone’ll know.”
“Know what? That you’ve got your facts wrong? That you’re out of your mind? That there’s no conceivable way that I could have had a child in this lifetime? Now if you would, I’m going to rejoin my family for supper. It would behoove you to make off this property and never come back here again.”
“I can tell them about that day you stopped to talk to me on the side of the road just outside of Waubeek. The one you’re always painting on. How about that?”
The boy had gotten louder and was roaming now around the yard, which was covered in crisp leaves. “Can’t you see it?” He threw his arms up and presented the sky to both of them. “Iowa’s Golden Boy Exposes Himself to Local Teenager. ‘American Gothic’ Painter Paints Himself Pink.”
“You have got to keep it down,” Grant said between his teeth, “and leave here right now.”
“You want me to shut up? You want me gone?” The boy held out a hand and lifted his chin to an angle perfect for punching. “Pay me.” And there was that something again that felt familiar to Grant, that rage inside of him that he had for his older brother that he could muster any time he thought about him long enough. Could the kid be a nephew he’d never met? He had Arnold’s high forehead and long cheeks. That was it: his cheeks. Grant’s memory failed him now, though, he couldn’t recall if he’d ever met the boy. Unless--
“I don’t have the sort of money you’re scheming after. I might be known but I’m just a farmer-artist. I live with my mom and sister. Up there.” He looked to the main window to make sure Nan wasn’t looking down on them and saw that it was still open. They’d no doubt heard something. He couldn’t tell if Turner’s windows were open as well, but he was never very far. Grant lowered his voice and spoke as if in confidence. An intimacy: “Fact of the matter is, you’ve come to the wrong place. We haven’t got a pot to piss in.”
The boy moved toward him and Grant stayed put. They were so close now that Grant was no longer there but in a lone cloud above a neighbor’s chimney, which looked, in the pre-twilight sky, like a severed head floating away from an oval body, a pig’s head, maybe, guillotined.
What if they’d all come back for him someday, with pitchforks and fury, demanding he owe them? The slow and steady march of the vengeful making their way towards him from all directions, circling in on him, narrowing all escapes. The one who wants his money, leading the charge. The one who wants his fame, close behind. And all along the periphery: the one who wants his job, the one who wants his attention, the one who wants his cock sucked, the one who wants to suck, the one who wants a commitment, the one who wants his friends, the one who wants another chance, the one who wants his talent, the one who wants to be held, the one who wants to save him, the one who wants his dad back.
Smoke tumbled out the neighbor’s chimney and settled between the pig’s severed head and body, filling in the gap, reattaching it to whole again. How was such a thing possible, he wondered as it drifted, morphed. Who would ever see such a thing again? Who, in fact, would ever believe him, and how could he possibly convince anyone of what was real or not?
The yelling came from all directions now. His sister, leaning out the door from above, making something up about how they needed his help with something, a lie that sounded like a lie as she yelled it for the entire block to hear, and then this boy in front of him, his face nearly in Grant’s chest, telling him if he didn’t hold his son then he’d ruin his career forever. And Turner’s dog, finally on the scene, howling over everyone with his front paws high up on one of the young man’s pantlegs.
“Aren’t you going to invite your son in for dinner? It’s the least you could do.” He petted Beauregard and then gently pushed him down with one hand, only for the dog to pop back up again. “Say it. Say son. I want to hear you call me your son.”
Now the pig cloud had disappeared completely. There was nowhere left for Grant to look but in the boy’s brown eyes.
“You’re nobody’s son around here.”
“I knew it. You’re just another part-time pansy. Back road fairy.”
The boy’s lip trembled and his face twitched. He stood still as Grant turned and made his way towards the stairs and on up to the studio. Before he opened the door, Grant looked down at the kid again, who hadn’t left the property, hadn’t even moved except to put his head down to scratch Beauregard’s ears and scruff. The top of the boy’s head was softer than the rest of him, glinting in the dark dusky light.
He was somebody’s son.
Turner appeared then out the back door of his house, and the three men formed an unlikely constellation with Grant at the top. The two older men caught eyes just before Grant re-entered the studio, and he gave his landlord a couple of nods to let him know everything was fine and resolved. He shut and locked the studio door behind him, took off his shoes, and rejoined his family at the table, ceding whatever was going to be said outside without him there.
Nan looked hard into him. His mother did, too. It felt like more and more, everyone wanted answers from him, like he could not have one conversation, paint one painting, take one afternoon drive without having to account for it.
“Well?” Nan said.
“Well what. I’m hungry.” He grabbed the basket of rolls even as two sat uneaten on his plate. He placed another one down beside them, cut into his square of meat pie with the side of his fork. He blew on it even though it had lost its heat, and then again as he held the fork in front of his mouth. “It was nothing. Just another farm waif looking for his ticket out of town.”
“You’ve never met him?”
“I haven’t the foggiest—”
“David really should put up a gate,” Hattie said. “I can’t imagine he likes having all these strangers showing up.”
“All? There’ve been five. Six,” Grant said, then put the forkful of food into his mouth.
“Don’t forget those ladies who barged right in here when we were eating,” Nan said. “And had the nerve to tell us to carry on.”
“Nobody wants to wait at a gate when they show up to a funeral home,” Grant said. “It’s hard enough to make that trip.”
“Well somebody needs to contain them,” Hattie said.
“You and all of your American Gothic boys,” Nan said. “What a sight for the bereaved.”
Grant slammed a fist onto the table. “You can stop right now,” he said, and they did, eating the rest of their meals listening only to silverware tap and slide across each other’s plates and teeth.
Once they’d finished, Grant was the first to get up.
“We forgot to say grace,” Hattie said. She looked gently at her son until he sat down and folded his hands on the table. They’d started saying grace after Maryville had died and Hattie brought them to a Presbyterian church in town instead of the Quaker meetinghouse in Whittier, but Grant had never taken to The Lord’s Prayer, he still preferred listening for the still quiet voice within.
“Our Father—” Hattie said, summoning one and sentencing another.
As inconceivable as it was, him siring a son, let alone at, what would he have had to have been, twenty-one? As far-fetched and delusional even, as it was, he let himself test the thought for a moment as he closed his eyes and listened to his sister and mother recite their prayer. Even though Maryville had been dead for nearly thirty years, he still thought of his dad all the time—everyone did—and pictured him now in the empty seat beside them. His father would have punished him outright and been done with it, not endlessly needle him, which somehow hurt worse.
After they cleared the table, Grant stepped back outside to smoke a cigarette. He sat on the top stair overlooking the spot in the yard where he’d stood with the young boy-man, filling his chest with slow drags and exhaling into the night sky as Nan washed dishes on the other side of the door.
He knew the road alright. Sometimes he visited the dead, and his dad, in the cemetery in Anamosa, whenever he needed a silence louder than the noise in his head, and he’d take the long route home. If he’d drunk too much the night before, he couldn’t tap in, couldn’t hear whatever was being communicated through that thin veil between life and death, between up here and down there (or was it always only here, all of it?).
Being near the body of his father comforted him, laying on the soil, pressing his ear to the ground like Maryville was trapped under ice and trying to say something to him. Grant didn’t know how to put it, or how to think it properly in a way that sounded and felt safe, but lately he thought maybe a part of him wanted to die. That it wouldn’t be the worst thing. That maybe there was something there on the other side, not like what they’d ministered at his father’s meetinghouse, and not what all the others in his mom’s family believed about angels and hellfire and saints, but some kind of love in being past all of it, being done with the judgment and the fear and the stress and the success, which was always just shy of enough, hovering instead in that calm space Maryville went to whenever he had looked out across the cornfields or closed his eyes in meeting for worship.
Grant had never forgotten the feeling of trying to fall asleep in a lighter house the night Maryville had traveled to another county to help a cousin of his for Threshing Day, where he stayed the night so they could get to work early the next morning. Something wasn’t right inside—a piece had gone missing. Not knowing when his father would return and not even really knowing where he was or why at the time, just that he wasn’t there and under the same roof, assuming he’d reappear in the morning at the kitchen table, where all things eventually came to reset—that’s the thought that finally got young Grant to sleep that night, that feeling of everyone in their right place at the table, all the seats filled, the last place they’d all be alive together.
Except Maryville didn’t return for an entire week, and the house got quieter and darker and the family grew more estranged, like a practice round for the real thing. Grant took to walking to the neighbors after school looking for his father, which was about as far as he could go without spooking himself or his mother. He kicked rocks at the edge of the neighbor’s drive and tried to look like he was just passing by, but no one just passed on by out there, not on their road. Before he knew it, he was trespassing. Belly-flat on the grass, laying alongside the Buchanans’ farmhouse in the late afternoon, inching his neck forward to peer into the basement windows as Sam Buchanan stood on a stepladder, carefully gluing pieces of a mast together on a giant model ship. The very scale of it was absurd, so large it would never make it out of the room, let alone up the stairs or out of the house, a ship too small for any significant body of water and too big to leave this place underground.
What was the point of making something no one would ever see?
Or building a vessel that couldn’t take you away.
Out here, everyone was looking for a way out—to the horizon, to God, to their teachers and down dirt roads as far as they could drive. Part of your plight, if you weren’t a doctor or a dentist or married to one, was looking for a way out.
During the week preceding Threshing Day that year on their own farm, when the days were still long and the evenings somehow longer, the fields lit up by the moon and the softened golden filter of hay it shone down on, the Wood boys played Hide-and-Seek among the shocks of hay, where Grant learned how to make himself invisible enough not to get caught, how to press his face into a shock and peer into it until everything went dark, inhaling the scent of his father and looking for any sign of a white fleck. The hay scratched his cheeks and eyelids and forehead and arms; it stung and poked and stabbed.
If it was still damp, it smelled like the wet parts inside their barn. Wet canvas and wood and earth. Maryville had always told them to keep an eye out for white spots and foul smells, in case one of them had started to rot from within, like was happening inside of Maryville’s heart now but which no one could see. Once it dried, it started smelling sweeter, more like corn, and that’s when it turned crisp, but not brittle. Bendable, but not breakable by hand. That’s when Grant knew the men would soon arrive, by the smell that preceded them, and it’s when his father would start to relax.
Darkness crept up slowly and then suddenly one night, and no one had answered Grant’s call when he yelled out for his brothers. He dashed for the house when he realized he was alone in the dark, only to find it locked once he got there. With his palms and face flattened against the windowpane of their side door, he started counting to himself, and when he reached one-hundred Mississippi, he turned to whispering through the door to his father, who he imagined was just on the other side of the kitchen, tending to the broken lamp beside his reading chair. Then, a carriage approached on the dirt road, its wheels crunching gravel as it slowed and made its way up their driveway. When Grant turned around, the light of a lantern illuminated his father’s face. A moment later, the door behind him unlocked and his two brothers ran out to greet their dad. He’d come home just in time for supper.
On Threshing Day, Maryville’s farmhand Slim arrived early and in a particularly good mood. He’d been around a lot more recently, working longer hours and helping Maryville on extra projects in the yard and on the house itself, not just in the barn and in the fields. He stood tall with dark hair and thick eyebrows twisted up like licorice, his forearms coursed with visible veins, and he moved around the farm—on a horse, in the fields, at the washbasin—like a man who didn’t have anything to prove. Every point of contact Slim had with the earth felt right to Grant, like he was doing what the lord had put him here to do, and there was no second-guessing in his face or in his shoulders, no dark cloud about him like the ones that regularly passed through Grant’s parents when the times were lean, which was always. He left as happy as he arrived each day, grateful for work and for companionship and for life. Grateful for God.
Slim had left him well enough alone most of that year, Grant too terrified to even let himself be seen by the older men but possessed enough by what they did and how they did it and what they emanated that he couldn’t help but get caught, dumb as an ox, staring straight ahead every damn time he did show his chubby ruddy face. His father didn’t really want him around anyway. Or so he thought. He was too awkward, couldn’t hardly open his mouth around an adult he wasn’t related to, and when he did, everything came out sideways and shrill or else got stuck in his throat as the words pooled inside him, needing squeezed out. And when they did tumble out, nobody could hardly hear him, anyhow.
As other men continued arriving, he watched Slim bend to pick up a bundle of golden wheat, the contours of his overalls darkening near his mid-section, a stab of sunlight on the side of his neck next to a kidney-shaped birthmark, his biceps filling out his shirt as he hugged the bundle and dragged it like a corpse to the threshing machine where a couple of men had positioned themselves, one to hand bunches to the other one, who would tear it apart into smaller chunks to feed into the machine.
Whenever all of the guys were there with his father, Grant saw what it was for Maryville to be the man with real sons. He saw the harmony as they worked together, the inherent language and connection they shared when not speaking, even the resemblance, somehow, in their appearances, despite Slim having a different hair color and build. Some of the guys had the same coveralls and boots. The younger ones, his older brother among them, were the walkers, catching the grain in burlap sacks as it fell out the bottom of the machine before walking it to the wagons.
When everything happened at once—one of the metal arms raised high shedding grain dust out into the air above them, steam shooting into the sky, and the big machine’s clanks and moans and hisses filling the space around them, men barking instructions to one another they couldn’t even hear as the machine continued gyrating before them—it snowed fresh dust, covering the men in gold.
Just as soon as he’d felt like one of those men, as soon as he’d looked hard enough and fell into the golden dream before his eyes and belonged, just one of the guys out there threshing wheat and working that earth over and if not manning then being near that big machine and all that power turning it out, getting it done, sucking on a loose piece of straw like the big boys and slowly getting covered in layers of grain dust and sweat and dirt like them big boys too, running a finger across his forehead to feel the grit and then feeling his whole face covered in it, licking the tip of his finger as the men in front of him, his brothers, wiped their faces with bandanas and rags, the forearms of their flannels, or their bare hands, the canvases of their lives already prepped, already layered with years of this same work, grit seeped so far into their bodies it would forever be a part of whatever happened next, forever their foundation, a smudged and weathered pigment—
Just as soon as he’d tasted their skin and bones, Slim caught him daydreaming near the side of the threshing machine and came over to tell him to keep his body facing them at all times, that he’d had his eye on him and wanted him to be safe. Slim rested a hand on Grant’s shoulder and squared his body with his own, then Grant heard him call him Son in a way that felt holy, the same feeling he’d had of the nearness of his father’s god once in meeting for worship when a visiting elder had lain a safe and steady hand on him in the hush of the cold and dim meetinghouse, and just as soon as the feeling reappeared, he prayed to that same god to let Slim’s hand stay there just a little bit longer, right there, just like that. All of it in an instant as the dust kept pouring down on them, as the great machine chug-a-lugged and jerked in the air behind Slim, as the sun flattened across the sky in an ochre smear, as the button on Slim’s overall clasp shined like the only real sun around, a blinding wink, the whole universe here in this moment on Slim’s chest and in the hand that had come down from above and touched him, a voice so soothing it hadn’t even made him swallow his words or stutter, he’d even said something back, just like that (was it dumb? Oh god, oh shit), and now a laugh between them (had he actually made him laugh? Or was he back in the world again, the one that laughed at him?), no sooner than this universe in miniature presented itself did the engine cut out in time for a call to come bellowing out from the house for everyone to hear.
“Grant, honey! Come now, we need you inside.”
His mom. The ladies. His fate.
He looked up at Slim who nodded approvingly, then he lowered his head and pivoted toward the house, but not because he’d been called. The moment he turned away from Slim, a shock of shame burst inside of him.
*
Twenty-nine years later and twenty-five miles away, outside 5 Turner Alley, Grant felt the same explosion inside as he exhaled into the night sky. A distant train whistle blew. He snubbed out his cigarette in a terra cotta dish and grabbed the cold door handle. His knuckles were chapped and he needed a drink.
Inside, he heard the train whistle again, and the crackle of a fire, and the deafening silence his family had perfected in times like these. His mother had taken to her bed in the corner and Nan read in an armchair by the fire. Grant removed his shoes, poured himself a drink, and sat on the edge of his own bed, opposite Hattie’s. A log broke, fell into place. Nan flipped the page of a magazine. Things would return to normal between them in the morning, once they sat down for breakfast, but until then, an unwelcome guest remained—that awful feeling deep inside. Hattie lay on her side with one cheek on her pillow and her other cheek dully lit. The sheen of a tear streak graced his mother’s face. If only he could make it go away, he thought, and took a drink. If only he could leave.
Inside, he heard the train whistle again, and the crackle of a fire, and the deafening silence his family had perfected in times like these. His mother had taken to her bed in the corner and Nan read in an armchair by the fire. Grant removed his shoes, poured himself a drink, and sat on the edge of his own bed, opposite Hattie’s. A log broke, fell into place. Nan flipped the page of a magazine. Things would return to normal between them in the morning, once they sat down for breakfast, but until then, an unwelcome guest remained—that awful feeling deep inside. Hattie lay on her side with one cheek on her pillow and her other cheek dully lit. The sheen of a tear streak graced his mother’s face. If only he could make it go away, he thought, and took a drink. If only he could leave.