My Aunt Louise wore three feathers in her hair that summer I went to live with her. “Red-tailed hawk,” she said, though the feathers were tawny brown and glistened evilly from the black bun where she stuck them, conjuring in a boy’s mind the commandment Thou shalt not commit adultery, barked sternly by our old minister back home. I couldn’t say why it should, any more than I understood the commandment’s meaning.
Aunt Louise committed adulthood. Mother had warned me of that often enough, but was helpless before the necessity of bequeathing me to her. Mother had become paler and thinner through the spring, so listless she often refused to eat. By May, I cooked what few meals were taken in our house, hardly eating myself. Nobody mentioned the dreaded word, but somehow I picked it out of thin air — the smell of her vomit in the morning, hollows where her eyes had been, prescriptions I fetched from the pharmacy (cocooned in the pharmacist’s silence, the sly consolation of his eyes): cancer. I knew.
My boyhood, which never had much of a flight, without a father to navigate it, crashed hard that spring and remained down. Innocence was soon to follow.
Actually, Aunt Louise fit more naturally into the realm of childhood than adulthood: hawk feathers and pink tennis shoes, her habit of taking Ralph, a raggedy-eared tabby cat, to bed with her, beginning each day in her bedroom next to mine profanely expelling him. “Ungrateful little shit,” she’d scream. I rubbed the word’s hard underside against my palate, learning it was possible — as Mother had taught me it was not — to curse without conjuring a vivid image of the word uttered. Likely Mother had little practice.
But I stood transfixed, ears pinned to the sides of my head, the first time I heard Louise use the “F-word.” It was a word I had never actually heard uttered — certainly not in my mother’s house. I couldn’t get enough of it. I practiced firing it at knickknacks in my room like a Remington hollow-point. I never missed. It made my ears burn to think of Mother lying in a hospital bed in Portland while I practiced the F-word in Seattle, but I was as helpless before it as some are before a slot machine. Any boy raised to believe humans are featureless beneath their clothing is at the mercy of every obscenity.
The obscenity facing Mother that summer was too filthy even for Aunt Louise’s seasoned lips. I knew well enough that, without drastic cause, mothers like mine do not entrust their adolescent sons to aunts like Louise. Surely, Mother would have kept me among her own people if there had been any. But she, too, was an only child, her parents dead. So in desperation, days before she checked in for her operation, she turned to Louise, who had always had a soft spot for Mother and me.
“You are going to stay with your father’s sister a time,” Mother told me that last day, exhausted from the effort of sitting up in a chair, her hands icy wafers, sandwiching mine between. Their cold terrified me, as did the pulsing blue veins, like angleworms, that had appeared overnight in the hollow above her nose. “You may see some strange things, Tommy. Louise’s hygiene isn’t up to what you are accustomed to, she keeps odd hours, and she smokes too much.” Mother’s fingers clutched my elbow, her eyes the ethereal blue of a saint with only one foot in this world. “Remember what I’ve taught you. Trust in your own good judgment.” She smiled at me with lips alkaline pale and chafed. It occurred to me then that she expected me to see strange things — that she counted on it, as she had once counted on my learning to swim at summer camp.
Aunt Louise lived alone in a narrow house on a back street of Seattle. The kitchen was flooded with light that poured in through huge casement windows and bathed the tile floor like clean white water. But the front of the house was dark and cluttered, shut away from prying eyes, heavy curtains always drawn. It seemed odd to me: my “liberal-minded” aunt, who voted for Kefauver and believed in premarital sex, living in a junk shop full of old-fashioned furniture my mother would have thrown out. Books, written in French or windy, strident English that reminded me of an equinoctial storm, lay on their bellies over rug and davenport, their spines broken. “Existentialists,” she called them.
Her neighbors she dubbed “dirty-minded little conformists,” saying, “They’d burn me at the stake if it were legal.” She dismissed them with a wave of her hand, fixing restless black eyes on me. “Whatever you do, Tommy, promise me you won’t become a cruddy little go-along.”
I shook my head vigorously, staring at the red rind about her cigarette filter, piled atop other cigarette butts spilling from the ashtray.
Mother said Louise was smart enough to teach college but lacked ambition. She worked as a supermarket cashier, didn’t have much to say about college, and wasn’t interested in anything that hadn’t fallen into disrepute or disrepair or that wasn’t threatened with extinction. Openhearted, she talked to anyone: the mailman, Fuller Brush salesmen, Paul Harvey on the radio (shrieking, “Piss-pot conservative!” from the kitchen sink, refuting his every point as if he stood there in the room beside her). She talked nonstop to me: the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Three Stooges, the Korean War. The war worried me. After all, my dad had died in the last war. In just six years I would be old enough for the draft. Louise assured me that modern wars don’t last that long. “This nuclear business has put an end to that,” she said.
Somewhere along the line Aunt Louise had picked up a Southern accent, along with the tight little bun, feathers, and purple sack-dresses. She loved Elvis, knew his ring size and brand of deodorant, and every record in the order he’d recorded it. She embroidered his slick-haired silhouette on pillowcases and sang “Hound Dog” in the shower, but confessed to me her suspicion he wasn’t much in bed. “Vain men make lousy lovers.” Winking in that broad way she had of making me feel privy to something generally unknown.
About the house she wore a sleeveless smock without any shape but what she gave it. I was just becoming aware of such things: my aunt’s sharp breasts and bony hips. I would lean to the side — as if to catch sight of a bird passing outside — and steal, through an armhole, a peek of a creamy breast. Once she caught me at it.
“Look at you! You’re red as a beefsteak tomato.” She laughed. “Hey, it’s healthy to be curious. Look! — nothing to hide.” Louise gripped the hem of her smock as if to lift it.
“No, ma’am!” I cried. “I don’t . . . I mean . . .”
“I got your number. On the sly.” She winked and ruffled my hair.
I pulled away, my cheeks burning chili hot, and went straight outside. Not to my friend Jeff’s next door (who wasn’t allowed on Louise’s property because she said he possessed “a low moral temperament”), but to the nearby hills, from whose tops I caught flint blue glimpses of Puget Sound. Late that afternoon I returned through a cold drizzle, clothes damp, a chill working into my bones, and moved stealthily through the gloomy living room, planning to go straight upstairs without speaking to Louise. It wasn’t my fault she didn’t wear proper underthings or that she undressed — as Jeff assured me she did — without closing her drapes. (“Come see for yourself. It’s better than Playboy.”) I tiptoed past bookshelves and lion-footed overstuffed chairs, certain I could make it to my room unnoticed and somehow survive the night without supper. But a voice snagged me from the shadows.
“I was worried about you.”
Louise was folded deep into the couch, barely visible, swaddled in the burgundy glow from the drapes.
“Holy shit! You scared me.”
“Better don’t talk like that when you go home. I’ll catch hell for teaching you profanity.”
“You say it all the time.”
“I’m free to say whatever I please, buster.” She made a rustling sound, sitting up on the couch. “Your mama wrote.”
“To me?”
“Listen, Tommy, you might have to stay a little longer.”
I shrugged, pretending not to care. “She got out of the hospital last week.”
“They’ve checked her back in. Nothing serious, honey. Routine.” Her eyes slid away like they did when she discussed Elvis’s religious beliefs or Kefauver’s wife.
I sensed fog creeping up from the sound along empty streets, ambushing buildings, filling nether regions of my aunt’s long, tall house.
“You got to have faith, Tommy. You know I think churches are turkey piss, but I believe in rightness. I believe in faith.”
“Will they open her up again?”
“Not very far.” Her eyes flashed at me. “Just a little.”
I envisioned a zipper in my mother’s stomach that they could open and close at will. The idea scandalized me as nothing Louise said ever could.
We ate lavishly that night: corn waffles, rice with milk and sugar, Chet’s turkey potpies; our favorites. We felt like being kind to ourselves.
Next morning, when I shuffled from my bedroom to pee, I discovered Louise had left the bathroom door ajar. Another kindness? I stopped short, staring at my aunt afloat in the tub, lazily steaming water lapping blue-green at the rim, her eyes gazing blankly upward, knobby knees breaking the surface, long black hair snaking down her stomach, clinging to her secret parts. For an instant I thought she was dead. Though I knew artificial respiration from Scouts, how could I possibly perform mouth-to-mouth on my naked aunt in the bathtub? Better to pretend I hadn’t seen her. I had started to tiptoe away, mortified with guilt, when her corpse spoke behind me.
“You can use the toilet, honey. I won’t peek.”
Afterward, neither of us mentioned the incident. At breakfast I kept my eyes focused on hawk feathers, leaning at acute angles from her bun, like TV antennas clinging to tenement roofs. This was another lesson of that summer: if two people ignore a thing, it’s as if it never occurred. The world is not as black-and-white a place as I was raised to believe.
On that basis I accepted Jeff’s offer to stay the night at his house. Louise thought it a splendid idea. “We could use time off from each other, don’t you think?”
Later that night, when she returned from work, Louise sniffed us out as we peeked into her bedroom window from Jeff’s window next door, facing hers on the second floor. Her bedroom light snapped on, adding density to the hazy emptiness between houses. Louise stood at the window, looking directly across at the Venetian blinds behind which we huddled. Instinctively, I ducked. “She can’t see nothing,” Jeff huffed. “Who cares anyway?”
My aunt toyed a moment with a blouse button, then drew the shades. I breathed relief. And disappointment.
Jeff groaned. “You never told me she had a guy over there. She only closes up when she’s doing it.”
His imputation made me mad. “My Aunt Louise lives alone, jerk.”
He looked me over with a sly tilt of the head. “I guess you don’t know much down in Oregon.”
I punched his shoulder, bereft of the good judgment my mother had assured me would guide a son through such predicaments. Jeff was all over me, pummeling viciously at my head, chest, groin. I swooned beneath green currents, nausea clinging like seaweed to my stomach. Jeff pinned me down with his knees and breathed sourly in my face, teeth rooted in collars of yellow tartar, then cursed and rolled away in disgust. And I rolled up in my sleeping bag on the floor, tight as a mummy, amid a faint aura of dirty socks. Next morning the events of the previous night went unmentioned. Forgotten, as if they had never happened at all.
Later at Louise’s I met Uncle Sam. Anyhow, he told me to call him “uncle,” in a tone that brooked no disagreement. Biceps sagged down his arms like the contented bellies of Dylan Thomas’s uncles after a Christmas feed. A trellis of roses twined up the left forearm, enclosing in its lattice: Don’t Tread On Me! Then I realized the rose vines were really snakes. Grinning a gold tooth, Sammy demonstrated how, in the crook of his right elbow, a hula-skirted girl wiggled her belly when he pumped his arm.
“He’s a big ol’ shipwrecked dummy,” Louise said, flopping arms over his shoulders and resting her chin on the bald center strip of his head. “His ship is in port for the week. We hoped you wouldn’t mind if he came on board as our guest.”
They watched, awaiting my decision. I wasn’t stupid. I knew that, shipwrecked or not, men weren’t supposed to cohabit with women who weren’t their wives. Besides, tattooed sailors did not shack up with eggheads like Aunt Louise. I longed to return home, where women closed bathroom doors and uncles were truly uncles. It was all happening too fast: curse words, nudity, adults seeking my permission to sleep together in the house where I was a summer guest.
I nodded OK. Then Uncle Sam demonstrated the manly art of arm-wrestling while Louise made ham and eggs. Years later I would empathize with Sam’s shipwrecked nature and wonder whether every port of call in his sailor’s life offered some challenge akin to the nephew who lived with his aunt while his mother lay dying in a Portland hospital. A faltering, white-skinned, long-eyed, hay-feverish boy who, raised on simple virtues, took every word you said quite literally. Possibly in another port — Lake Charles, Louisiana, or Houston, Texas — a wife hounded him to settle down and his own son grew sullen, as mistrustful of Sam, his itinerant father, as I was.
Sam tried to instill in me his enthusiasm for tattoos and fighter planes, and pointed out the naked woman on a Camel pack. (I couldn’t find her, looking as I was for Aunt Louise afloat in the tub.) His sluggish blue eyes had a red crease through each pupil. Blood blisters, he explained, from some barroom brawl. He was proud of those wounds as he wasn’t of his war record. That troubled me.
Sam took me fishing on the pier: a highway of wooden planks on pilings against which the black sea frothed and snarled. I loved to watch the waves seethe white over layered barnacles and mussels on the timbers, spill slimy green off seaweed. One day, standing beside Sam on the pier, I told how my father had died on a troop transport, torpedoed off the Philippines before he reached the fighting. Sam stood indifferently watching the gulls, his pole drooping, line bellying close to the water. He seemed unaware of it, other than to check occasionally to see if he had lost his bait. I knew he had been a bombardier, flying missions over Pacific atolls. (He rattled off odd, tongue-tickling names: Saipan, Morotai, Pelelieu.) I envisioned him squatting in the bomb bay of a B-52, knees to chest, cradling each bomb lovingly in his hands before letting it drop into jungles below, squinting aim through the red cross hairs on his eyeballs. Avenging my father. It was the thing I found to like in him.
“I saw the whole shootin’ match, right on into Okinawa,” he said at last. “Personally, I liquidated sixty thousand Nips. You know what that does to a man? You know what he dreams about at night?”
“The Japs killed lots of people. They killed my dad.”
“Yeah, sure. Sure they did.” He patted a shirt pocket for the Alka-seltzer he took for his ulcer; screwing eyes tight as if swallowing molten lead.
“Don’t you use any water?” I asked him.
“Tommy, I’m real sorry about your dad. Still, it don’t matter who they are. Nips, Russians . . . don’t matter.” The line click-clicking as he reeled in. “It’s all human beings the same.”
“The Japs killed my dad.”
He looked at me, eyes gone vague and polished. Moisture burst from his lips. “What do you know about my dreams?” Wheeling on a duo of old-timers strolling the pier. “What do you know? Legionnaire bastards!” Sea gulls squealed away from his shout.
The men stood gawking at him. One led the other away by an elbow, throwing back nervous glances. Sam feinted toward them and they leapt forward in a bowlegged, geriatric sprint.
“What do any of them know about my dreams?”
A black man, fishing over the rail nearby, shook his head at me as if I were at fault somehow. When I wanted only escape. Not understanding why Louise sent me off to carry Sam’s bait bucket. Disgusted to think of him sharing my aunt’s bed. They tried to fool me by turning up the radio, but behind liquid rhythms of jazz, secret rhythms were at work. Every now and again a cry broke through — a wail, half-heard on the verge of sleep, so I couldn’t be sure it didn’t originate in my own unconscious.
Louise took me aside one day, eyes darting about the precincts of my room, smiling at a drawing I had done of a Tyrannosaurus rex. She put an arm around my shoulders and nuzzled my head, an affection I had learned to tolerate.
“Goodness’ sake, you’re nearly tall as me.”
I knew she hadn’t come to discuss my height.
“Listen, honeybunch. If this was an ideal world, wouldn’t be a thing you couldn’t tell your mother. But it isn’t. There’s things she doesn’t need to know about. Things a woman of her high character wouldn’t appreciate. You understand?”
“I know you have sex with Sammy,” I said.
Her head shook in confusion. I wondered why she could not smile without lipstick leaking onto her teeth.
“We don’t all share the same convictions. Some of us need some comforting. You might learn that yourself one day. Mama doesn’t need to know about Uncle Sam.” Her voice had gone cold and mercantile. “Maybe she doesn’t get so lonely.” She gripped my head in the crook of her arm, grinding her chin into my scalp. I struggled free from her smell of stale deodorant and perspiration.
“Is Mother dying?” I asked.
Louise flinched. “What makes you ask such a thing?”
“You won’t let me read her letter.”
“It wasn’t hers, honey. It was the doctor’s.”
“She’s dying, isn’t she?”
“I don’t believe it a minute. You’ll be going home soon. You’ll remember the good times we had and how you went fishing with Sammy. How about later we go to Discovery Park and ride the roller coaster? And maybe you can win a blue bear at the dime toss to send home to her. Think she’d like a blue bear?”
“I’m almost grownup,” I snapped, “I seen you naked in the bathtub. I’ve done things you wouldn’t even guess.”
She stared. “Well, I . . .”
“You don’t honor that at all.”
“I was thinking about your mother. And you, Tom.”
“I believe she wants it to go back like it used to be before they opened her up, when I lived at home and came to visit you for a week in the summer. And me, that’s all I want.”
“Me too. I’d like that.” She hugged me again, the sharp point of a breast inflaming me with mixed emotions. I wanted to tell her how I’d defended her that night at Jeff’s. There was too much world to hold up at once. I didn’t yet know the cleansing power of tears. I felt them dammed, cloistered inside of me, felt their pressure at my temples and at the back of my throat, felt them leak cautiously into my eyes and survey the landscape. But didn’t let them come. Tears are final. No one needed to teach me that. They come when we have surrendered to grief and there is no turning back. I was not willing to surrender Mother, or Aunt Louise. I wanted them both.
The argument started before supper. Uncle Sam boisterous all afternoon, drinking hard from a bottle in a brown-paper bag, winking at me when I looked up from baseball cards spread across the dining-room rug. (I had two Hank Aarons but needed a Peewee Reese.) Drinking buddy, claimant to his lewd jokes. I wished he would go down to Silky’s on the corner. Instead, he sprawled in bluejeans and buttonless work shirt on a kitchen chair, speaking to no one in particular about a scar across his belly.
“Friggin’ American Legion think war’s a dance around a cathouse. See that!” Opening his shirt to display a glazed pink weal slashing left to right (opposite what I imagined Mother’s to be).
“We’ve heard the story, Sammy. You’re talking to yourself,” Louise said.
“A Legionnaire done that. I carried my guts half a block before he got me down.”
“It isn’t the right time and place, Sammy.”
“You know what it feels like?” he asked me. “Slimy and soft, like wet silk. Heavy. You wouldn’t believe.”
I leapt up from my cards and charged upstairs to the bathroom with a hand over my mouth, afraid I was going to be sick.
“Shuddup!” Louise shouted. “Just shuddup your idiot mouth. His mother is dying . . .” Her words trailing off.
Sammy came blubbering behind me. “Sorry, kid. Didn’t mean no harm.” I hid behind the bathroom door. He stumbled. Seeing my chance, I leapt past him like a cat and was gone down the stairs and out of the house.
Thinking I might hitchhike to the hospital, I wandered the streets, until fog moved uphill along the wide avenues from the sound and scrubbed the façades of shingled houses. Cold in my sweat shirt, I started back to Louise’s.
The house was quiet. Yet there was breathing, as though the walls themselves were alive. The chill followed me inside. Front-room clutter had spread into the kitchen — but violently. An overturned chair, Louise’s blouse with two buttons missing. Silence was shattered by a single cry. Upstairs. A wavering, ululant groan, going on and on, with whimpering spasms between: the sound a woman might make with her throat locked in the hands of a beefy man.
I moved fast. Grabbed the largest butcher knife from the kitchen drawer, rivets of the wooden handle pressed cold against my palm, thick blade flat against my thigh, as I took the stairs two at a time.
Louise was smart enough to leave the bedroom door ajar, so I understood that first time — the bathroom — had been practice for what she had sensed coming. A woman’s intuition, Mother called it. I knelt behind the door, eyes adjusting to the greater darkness within. Sammy straddled her, as I expected he would. Bedcovers torn aside in brutal, heedless assault. His bare back faced me, quilted with hair.
He made a sound low in his throat and cast his eyes toward the ceiling. His hands slipped from her neck and gripped her shoulders, shaking. Regretting, perhaps, what he had done. I remembered reading in a Dick Tracy comic how a knife thrust six inches beneath the shoulder blade just to the side of the spinal column would plunge straight into the heart. The question was whether to go stealthily or to rush forward all at once like a football back and plunge the knife into him. I decided on the second.
He was talking again — that sotted, rambling patter of obscenity and regret. I lunged forward, knife raised over my head in both hands, a war cry in my throat.
Perhaps it was Louise’s eyes that made me hesitate. Not dead but alive, and gleaming as I had never seen them. Giving Uncle Sam time to pivot and catch the knife blade in his bare fist. Louise curled against the headboard, knees instinctually coiled to chest. Her eyes blinked in a feverish attempt to recognize me. “No,” she moaned. “Oh, no.”
Sammy slid the knife from his buckled, bleeding fingers. “Your daddy must’ve been a Legionnaire,” he said.
“I thought you choked her,” I stammered.
Blood dripped from his clenched fist onto the sheet. Sure to stain was all I could think. Perhaps Louise thought the same. She stared dumbly. Then leapt up. Firming a hand in the matted dent of Sammy’s back, she guided him downstairs to the kitchen.
I followed, gaping at those two naked adults. The wiry yet bearish man, clutching one fragile hand in the other, relinquishing it to her — dripping red over the sink — his mouth opening in a mute cry. I couldn’t comprehend what had happened or how I could have done such a thing. Couldn’t understand it at all. Louise ripped a flowered towel down the middle and wrapped it about his palm, split ends tied in a knot over the wound: what I recognized, from Scouts, as a tourniquet.
“It’s deep, Sammy,” she said. “We better call a doctor.”
He sucked air out of his cheeks and ran the good hand back over his scalp. His eyes rolled at me, each pupil creased, a tiny fold of red.
My mouth worked to tell him I was sorry.
“Does it hurt?” I managed.
“Only when I think about it.” He winked.
“We need a doctor,” Louise insisted.
At that instant the phone rang. Louise seized it.
“Dr. Bailey!” She laughed surprise. “Yes, yes, he’s right here with me.”
She discovered me then — her free hand pestering the air with gestures of concealment — the corner of her lip spasming reflexive smiles, as when she imitated Elvis’s “Hound Dog.”
“Yes, I understand.” Her eyes closed, the heavy lids. “Ohhhh,” she groaned. “Oh, damn it all to holy hell.”
I watched, trying to concentrate, to focus: deflated nipples dark as coffee, puffy body sagging toward middle age. Not shocking or dirty, in the way Jeff next door had it. Merely unexpected. Even Mother, I thought, if one saw her like the day she was born. . . . Then, before tears gripped me, it occurred to me that I could flee. Before it was too late. Before Aunt Louise sent the house of cards tumbling with a whack of the hand. But she had already let the phone slide into its berth, snatched up her torn blouse from the floor and slipped it over her shoulders, as if considering her informality inappropriate to the task at hand.
Sammy had vanished. That blouse with its missing buttons the only evidence he had been there at all.
“He’ll be back,” she said huskily, slipping an arm around me. “Like reincarnation. Do you know about reincarnation? Our ship departs, but it returns. I want you to believe that, Tommy. No one ever leaves for good and final.”
That night she took me into her bed and held me close, explained that some lessons come when one is too young to receive them. Death always arrives too young. All night I lay awake, wondering what I had done that God should punish me so severely. Nestled against the loaf of her belly, I understood my Aunt Louise was a living metaphor. In her person she had condensed life and offered it to me as a gift. Perhaps that is why Mother had sent me to her, knowing her own chances. Strong diseases require strong remedies.
“Mama’s dead,” I said when Louise woke beside me next morning.
Ill-humored to find me in her bed, eyes gritty with sleep, she shooed me out as she did Ralph, but gently.
“How would you like to live with me?” she asked later. “Maybe we could adopt each other.” She promised — as soon as she could do so without breaking down — to tell me how Mama passed away.
“There will have to be rules,” she told me, after grief had come like a prodigal father returned from a long absence. Taunted and reduced me to bone in clean, pure sunshine. And when it left, I was weak and new footed, making my way through a bleak but acceptable terrain.
“No more sleeping in my bed; you’re too old for that. You make breakfast, I’ll make dinner. You can do housework when you can’t stand the mess any longer. Do your homework every night. And in cases where her judgment and mine conflict, you will honor your mother. First and foremost, you will always be her son.”
William Luvaas’s “Original Sin” is excerpted from VeriTales: Ring of Truth, an anthology of short fiction. Copyright © 1993 by Fall Creek Press. Used by permission of Fall Creek Press, P.O. Box 1127, Fall Creek, OR 97438, (800) 964-1905.
— Ed.
