Full Dark, No Stars

“You’l have to take that up with her. She wants to have a celebration. We’re sel ing up and moving to Omaha.”

“No!”

“Wel … we’l see. It’s real y up to you, Son. Come out on the porch.”

His mother rose tipsily to her feet when she saw him, wrapped her arms around his waist, pressed her body rather too tightly against his, and covered his face with extravagant kisses. Unpleasantly

smel y ones, from the way he grimaced. The Conniving Man, meanwhile, fil ed up her glass, which was empty again.

“Final y we’re al together! My men see sense!” She raised her glass in a toast, and slopped a goodly portion of it onto her bosom. She laughed and gave me a wink. “If you’re good, Wilf, you can suck

it out of the cloth later on.”

Henry looked at her with confused distaste as she plopped back down in her rocker, raised her skirts, and tucked them between her legs. She saw the look and laughed.

“No need to be so prissy. I’ve seen you with Shannon Cotterie. Li’l baggage, but she’s got pretty hair and a nice little figger.” She drank off the rest of her wine and belched. “If you’re not getting a touch of that, you’re a fool. Only you’d better be careful. Fourteen’s not too young to marry. Out here in the middle, fourteen’s not too young to marry your cousin.” She laughed some more and held out her glass. I fil ed it from the second bottle.

“Poppa, she’s had enough,” Henry said, as disapproving as a parson. Above us, the first stars were winking into view above that vast flat emptiness I have loved al my life.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “In vino veritas, that’s what Pliny the Elder said… in one of those books your mother’s always sneering about.”

“Hand on the plow al day, nose in a book al night,” Arlette said. “Except when he’s got something else in me.”

“Mama!”

“Mama!” she mocked, then raised her glass in the direction of Harlan Cotterie’s farm, although it was too far for us to see the lights. We couldn’t have seen them even if it had been a mile closer, now that the corn was high. When summer comes to Nebraska, each farmhouse is a ship sailing a vast green ocean. “Here’s to Shannon Cotterie and her brand-new bubbies, and if my son don’t know the

color of her nipples, he’s a slowpoke.”

My son made no reply to this, but what I could see of his shadowed face made the Conniving Man rejoice.

She turned to Henry, grasped his arm, and spil ed wine on his wrist. Ignoring his little mew of distaste, looking into his face with sudden grimness, she said: “Just make sure that when you’re lying

down with her in the corn or behind the barn, you’re a no -poke.” She made her free hand into a fist, poked out the middle finger, then used it to tap a circle around her crotch: left thigh, right thigh, right bel y, navel, left bel y, back again to the left thigh. “Explore al you like, and rub around it with your Johnny Mac until he feels good and spits up, but stay out of the home place lest you find yourself locked in for life, just like your mummer and daddy.”

He got up and left, stil without a word, and I don’t blame him. Even for Arlette, this was a performance of extreme vulgarity. He must have seen her change before his eyes from his mother—a difficult

woman but sometimes loving—to a smel y whorehouse madam instructing a green young customer. Al bad enough, but he was sweet on the Cotterie girl, and that made it worse. Very young men cannot

help but put their first loves on pedestals, and should someone come along and spit on the paragon… even if it happens to be one’s mother…

Faintly, I heard his door slam. And faint but audible sobbing.

“You’ve hurt his feelings,” I said.

She expressed the opinion that feelings, like fairness, were also the last resort of weaklings. Then she held out her glass. I fil ed it, knowing she would remember none of what she’d said in the morning (always supposing she was stil there to greet the morning), and would deny it—vehemently—if I told her. I had seen her in this state of drunkenness before, but not for years.

We finished the second bottle ( she did) and half of the third before her chin dropped onto her wine-stained bosom and she began to snore. Coming through her thus constricted throat, those snores sounded like the growling of an il -tempered dog.

I put my arm around her shoulders, hooked my hand into her armpit, and hauled her to her feet. She muttered protests and slapped weakly at me with one stinking hand. “Lea’ me ’lone. Want to go to

slee’.”

“And you wil ,” I said. “But in your bed, not out here on the porch.”

I led her—stumbling and snoring, one eye shut and the other open in a bleary glare—across the sitting room. Henry’s door opened. He stood in it, his face expressionless and much older than his

years. He nodded at me. Just one single dip of the head, but it told me al I needed to know.