Just Another Friday

Eric Trethewey

I was fourteen that winter. We lived in an old, drafty farmhouse with no furnace and no running water. The place was comfortable enough in the summer but miserable when the weather turned cold and snow began to fall.
    I had been hunting most of the afternoon, and dusk was falling when I arrived home.
    I turned on the back door porch light and, kneeling in the snow, gutted and skinned the rabbit I had shot. The five I had snared I hung from a spike on the side of the house. For a quarter my sisters could be persuaded to stand at the side of the road and offer them up to passing cars. People were prepared to pay two dollars a pair.
    I hadn’t been home long when a car drove up the lane to the house. It was the MacPhees, Stu’s family. Stu was the younger man my mother lived with. The man I thought was my father throughout my childhood had left because Mom was having an affair with Stu. Stu’s family was bad news.
    “Where’s Stu?” my mother asked when they filed through the back door.
    Jim, his younger brother, said, “We thought he’d be here. We saw him in The Black and Tan an hour or so ago, and he told us to come out here.” The Black and Tan was a tavern in Halifax.
    Ross Jr., the other brother, warmed his hands at the woodstove and cursed Stu because my mother said there was nothing in the house to drink.
    Jim was half drunk. I knew it was going to be a long night. A few months earlier they had all been drinking at a party. Stu was teasing Jim about his girlfriend, called her “a nigger bitch.” Jim grabbed a knife from the kitchen table, lunged, and stuck the blade to the hilt in his brother’s side. In his side and out through his back. Stu had almost died that time.
    “Where in the hell is Stu?” his sister, Barb, whined when she came through the door. “He said he was going to the liquor store, and then he was coming out here.”
    My mother moved to shut the door, but Barb said, “Don’t shut it, Bonnie. The old man is still out there drunk in the snowbank.”
    “Ramona,” sang a voice from outside.
    Moments later we heard the sounds of someone stumbling around on the porch, and then the old man came lurching into the house with my rabbits slung around his neck. He continued to sing but seemed to know only the first word of the song.
    “The old bastard’s crazy as a loon,” Jim said.
    “He’s been like that all the way out here,” Barb said as she tried to wrestle the rabbits from around her father’s neck while he did a jig around the kitchen.
    Hearing the ruckus, my grandmother came from the other side of the house where she and my grandfather lived. She must have had a few drinks as well because she joined Ross Sr. in his jig.
    Jim said, “Oh, oh, Katie’s been into the screech again.”
    My grandfather appeared in the doorway to the living room. He grabbed my shoulder, his grip like a vise, and said, “Rick, I want you to do the school tonight.” He, too, had been drinking.
    Granddad worked as the janitor in a nearby school to supplement his war pension. Once in a while, when he had been drinking or didn’t feel well, he would pay me a couple of dollars to sweep the classrooms for him. His excuse was always the same: “Only horses and fools works, and a horse turns his arse to it.” I was tired from tramping in the woods all afternoon but glad to get out of the house.
    As I left for the school, another car pulled into the lane. It was Stu, no doubt with the booze.
    By the time I finished sweeping the floors and emptying the garbage, the night was a whirlpool of snow. It was cold, and the sheets of fine, blown crystals cut into my face. I walked home, leaning into the wind and struggling through drifts.
    I stood outside the house for a few minutes listening to the boisterous talk and laughter from inside. Inevitably they began to sing, their voices off-key and drenched in sentimentality:

    Oh, how the old man must have felt,
    When he came down and opened the door
,     And found Mary dead and the child still alive,
    Closely clasped in its dead mother’s arms.

    Not wanting to speak to anyone—or witness the drunken display—I went in the back door and up to my room. Despite the caterwauling downstairs, I fell asleep almost immediately.

It may have been hours later when I woke to hear voices arguing outside my bedroom door. The wind still slashed at the northwest corner of the house, whining in short bursts in the eaves like a furiously revved high-powered engine, rattling loose panes of glass.
    The voices belonged to my mother and Barb.
    “Jesus Christ, Bonnie. It’s not gonna do him any harm,” Barb said. “It’ll be fun for him. You don’t think for a minute he’s a virgin, do you?” Her voice was slurred, uneven in emphasis.
    “I don’t care,” Mom said. “It’s not right. It’s just not right.” Her voice had taken on the irritating tones it assumed when she drank. Sober, she was a good mother, but drunk was another story. Now she was trying to have it both ways: drinking with riffraff but trying to protect her son from them.
    The women argued in loud whispers as the wind and whirling snow battered the windowpanes. At the foot of my bed, right beneath the windowsill, the snow had begun to drift into the room through cracks in the ancient molding. Tomorrow I would have to open the window and shovel it out again.
    From below came the sounds of singing and laughter. I wished that my mother was not out in the hallway. For sure, Barb was no looker, and she was drunk, but she was right about two things: I wasn’t a virgin, and it would be fun. I wished she had sneaked upstairs undetected. Stu had probably put her up to it, but I didn’t give a damn about that.
    I heard their voices moving back down the stairs. Mom had prevailed.
    I must have gone back to sleep, for the next thing I was aware of was Sherry, the oldest of my younger sisters, shaking me and begging me to get up. The next youngest, Cathy, was standing in the doorway, her thin arms holding up her pajama bottoms because the elastic waistband was broken.
    “Oh, Rick, Mommy’s dead. She’s down on the kitchen floor,” Sherry sobbed. Cathy was crying in the background.
    Still half asleep, I asked irrelevantly, “What time is it?”
    The snow by the window had drifted up to the sill and appeared to be hanging there like a white valance. I threw off the layers of blankets along with an army greatcoat, jumped into my jeans, and ran downstairs.
    Mom was alive, lying half under the table, moaning that she was dying.
    The kitchen was otherwise deserted. Empty beer and wine bottles, a rum bottle, and full ashtrays littered the room. Food-smeared supper dishes were stacked in the sink. The back door was open, permitting a thin, hooked finger of snow to probe its way into the house. The fire seemed to be out in the big woodstove. With each gust of wind, particles of snow skittered across the floor.
    I knelt beside my mother, trying to examine her stomach where I could make out, between her fingers, a dark, spreading stain. There was a bruise under one eye, and the left side of her face was swollen. When I kneeled, my leg touched something. I brushed it aside, recognizing as I did an imitation pearl-handled jackknife I had seen Stu use. The blade was open and spotted with blood.
    Impulsively, I moved her hands and pulled her shirt away from the wound. She winced in pain. Wiping the blood away from the wound with a corner of her shirt, I saw a small slit in the white flesh. The blood flow did not seem as bad as I had first thought. I held the shirt over it and told Sherry to fetch one of the large Band-Aids from the medicine chest. When I stuck it over the wound, the blood flow seemed to stop entirely.
    My grandmother rushed into the kitchen. “They’re rotten,” she raved. “The whole goddamned lot of them is crazy rotten.”
    What I saw when I turned to look at her made my stomach heave. Blood was smeared over the front of her dress and welled from a slash on her right arm. Apparently she had been trying to stanch the blood; she was holding a blood-soaked towel.
    “The MacPhees are rotten to the core,” she said.
    Sherry and Cathy were standing in the doorway to the living room, still crying. Sherry was holding the baby, our youngest sister, who was strangely silent. The kitchen door was still open; snow skittered across the floor.
    I remembered reading about making a tourniquet. I ordered my sisters to get back in bed because it was too cold in the kitchen and because they didn’t need to see any more of this disaster than they had already. With a dish towel and a piece of kindling, I jury-rigged an instrument to stop the blood oozing from my grandmother’s arm. By now she had seen the blood on Mom’s shirt and was becoming panicky, fighting my attempt to restrain her movements.
    Mom’s bleeding had apparently stopped. She struggled to her feet and tried to help me. Seeing her stand up, Nan calmed down. Eventually I managed to stop her bleeding. My hands were gluey with drying blood.
    I could only guess what had happened, but I had been around Stu long enough to know he was capable of almost anything when drunk. Once we had fought here in the kitchen. I got in a few sharp punches, but it wasn’t long before Stu, heavy-shouldered and bull-necked, with something of a reputation around the taverns in Halifax, wrestled me down and began to beat my head against the floor and choke me. Mom took a kettle of hot water off the stove and poured it on Stu’s back. She got a punch in the mouth for it—that left a jagged scar on her lip—but she saved me from anything more serious than a sore neck and a few lumps on my head.
    I heard a car door close outside. As rapidly as I could, I took my shotgun down from the rack above the pantry door, broke it down, and put a #2 cartridge in the hole of the breech. I heard the crunch of boots in snow outside the kitchen window.
    Stu came in quickly through the open door without closing it behind him. In his right hand he held the hatchet we used to cut kindling. The tops of his rubber boots were filled with snow, and his bushy hair and eyebrows were white with it, giving him a ghastly, inhuman look.
    “You rotten bastard,” my mother said, drawing out each word, pronouncing it separately. My sisters, in spite of my command, were still standing in the doorway. I pointed the gun. I stared at his face, windburned skin pulled tightly over the bones of his head. He looked like a stranger.
    “That’s it . . . do somethin’ you’ll be sorry for,” he said. “You don’t know what went on here. Your grandmother got cut by accident.”
    “You lie like the filthy pig you are,” my grandmother said.
    Stu moved as if to cross the kitchen to where we stood in a group. I had never pointed a real, loaded gun at anyone before. The hammer clicked as I pulled it back. I felt calm, completely unafraid. I realized, in that moment, that I could kill a man and probably not feel guilty afterwards.
    “Get out,” I heard myself say.
    I knew, could see it even before it happened, that if Stu took another step toward me, I would pull the trigger. There would be an explosion as the gun bucked in my hands, and the kitchen would fill with the familiar smell of cordite. There would be a lot more blood.
    Stu stopped, stood motionless. The sarcasm in his voice barely masking his fear, he said to Mom, “Why don’t you tell him what happened? Why don’t you tell him how you started the whole fucking thing with your big fucking mouth?”
    He started to speak again and then changed his mind. “Ah, fuck the lot of you. I’m leaving.” He gestured dismissively and, turning around, walked out of the house. I went to the door to make sure he had left. The car the other MacPhees had come in was gone.
    The snow had stopped almost completely, and the wind had died. I could see his dark form lumbering through the snow to his car. I waited until he pulled out of the driveway and headed in the direction of Halifax.
    My thumb was still on the hammer of the cocked shotgun. I eased it forward and leaned the gun in the corner. “We’d better go to the hospital,” I said. “Sherry, you take care of Cathy and Joy. We won’t be gone long. Get back into bed so you don’t freeze.”
    They would be okay. I was certain that if Stu did come back he wouldn’t hurt the girls. I suppose I could have tried to wake my grandfather, but he was sleeping off the drink and wouldn’t be of much use even if I could get him up.
    I helped my mother and grandmother struggle into their coats, and taking the loaded shotgun, I went out to warm up Granddad’s car.
    The night spread out around me. The eerie half light of the full moon, now visible after the storm, was reflected by the whitened earth. The motionless air, the cold, star-speckled canopy of the sky, the nimbus of a car’s headlights in the distance, the threatening bulk of snow mounds, all of it sank into my consciousness. I became part of the night, as if my sense of ordinary things had vanished, replaced by an inexplicable sense of well-being.
    I went back inside to help the two women. Still carrying the shotgun, I held Nan’s arm and led her out to the car. Then I went back for Mom. They both sat in the front seat. The whole time I kept surveying the landscape for movement.

I had decided to go in the opposite direction from Stu because the hospital was a bit closer. At first the going was dicey, drifted snow on the road close to a foot in places, but it became less deep as we drove. As the window defrosted I began to see much more clearly. I had taken the car out before, when I wasn’t supposed to, but aware that I was under the legal age and unlicensed, looking constantly in the rearview mirror for the RCMP, I had been unable to enjoy it. Tonight, out on this lonely road, with no driver’s license and a loaded shotgun in the backseat, I wasn’t worried about anything, least of all the Mounties.
    Nan’s arm was okay, but Mom had begun a low moaning that I could sometimes hear over the hum of the snow tires. The car, though it was old, betrayed no rattles. I have since noticed many times how cars always seem to ride better, quieter when it is raining or snowing.
    Five miles or so from Windsor, where the hospital was, it occurred to me that the car whose headlights I could see in my rearview mirror had been behind me for a long time. Behind me and very close. I sped up, but the car stayed with me. I thought of the shotgun lying across the backseat, studied the mirror.
    I was certain it was Stu. He got so close I couldn’t see his headlights. Then our heads jerked back. He had slammed into us. The old Buick fishtailed; I managed to straighten it out, but he hit us again. He was clearly trying to knock us off the road.
    “The filthy pig,” Nan said.
    When he hit us the third time, we slid sideways to the shoulder, but I managed to straighten up again. Though the road here was still treacherous, I drove much faster. I considered pulling over and shooting the bastard, but then I saw that he was dropping behind. When I saw his car turn left off the highway onto Ponhook Road, I knew exactly what was up. A bootlegger he had done business with before lived there. He had thought of something more important than knocking us off the road.
    At the hospital, a doctor examined Mom and told her that her stomach would be sore for a week, but she was okay, the cut wasn’t deep. He sterilized and dressed the wound. Nan was worse off. She needed ten stitches in her arm. After they had been treated, Mom wanted me to drive her to the RCMP station so she could file charges. She kept repeating that she was going to “put him on the rock pile.”
    I was surprised that the Mountie who interviewed us had no interest at all in the fact I was an obviously unlicensed driver. He escorted us home in case Stu was there.

The next day it was dark when I got home from school. There had been a hockey game, and though I was weary from the night before, the excitement, the long drives in darkness, I surprised myself by playing well. After the game I walked and hitchhiked home.
    As I walked up the driveway, I noticed the rabbits on the side of the house hanging stiffly in the cold. It was the first time I had thought of them since the day before.
    Entering the kitchen, I felt immediately that something was wrong. The house had been cleaned, but on the counter by the sink was a half empty bottle of wine. Sherry turned around from doing the dishes, moving her lips soundlessly as if to tell me to be quiet. She nodded toward the door to the living room.
    I put my book bag—an old WWII army knapsack—on the table and walked into the other room.
    Mom was lying on the couch, watching television. Beside her, asleep, snoring loudly, one thick arm extended across her chest as if holding her down, was Stu.
    “Supper’s ready,” she said. “Sherry will dish it up for you.”     I stared at her, shaking my head in disbelief.
    “How was your game?” she asked. “Did you win?” She spoke as if nothing had happened the night before.
    I stared at the wall above her. I thought I needed to say something but didn’t know what. So I just turned and walked back out to the kitchen.
    What else was there to do?

Eric Trethewey has published four books of poems. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and Britain; among them are the Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, Canadian Literature, Descant, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, The Paris Review, Parnassus, The New Republic, The Southern Review, and The Yale Review.

“Just Another Friday” appears in our Spring 2004 issue.