The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell Page B

spring of 1929 Willard and his knotty flock protested the Arbor Dance Hall. Those young decadent fools upstairs shook their bodies all about in thrall to impudent music, smoked cigarettes in mixed groups on the sidewalk, and from the alley a spill of devil juice scented the entire ugly picture. He reared back with the Book raised overhead and preached blue peril on the street outside until revelers began to mock him from the high windows, then from the street while walking past him with their promiscuous hands wandering one another. The top of Preacher Willard’s head unscrewed and hovered out of reach when derided by these gathered sinners with their smug hedonism and flouncy garb, and before the start of summer he said in a mighty letter of epic frustration printed in the newspaper, “I’ll blow this place to Kingdom soon and drop these sinners into the boiling pitch—see how they dance then!”

A t least twice a night little brother pissed into a milk bottle and I marked the yellow-depth on the glass with a green crayon. He’d wake me when he had to go, and it was my job to then block him from the bathroom, holding him, threatening, sitting on his back if called for, until I could hear a convincing trill of pain in his voice, then hand him the milk bottle. We were trying to stretch his bladder so he’d have no more accidents. We slept three boys to a room, triple bunk beds with one lowered, but older brother was busy with his increasingly adult dreams (this was not quite a full year before he married at seventeen and moved to the basement with his younger bride), so I’d take the warmed bottle out to empty it in the toilet. Dad would often be at the kitchen table, beer cans beside his textbooks, a smoky cloud of scholarship hung between the table and the light. He used a church key as a bookmark and always wore white shirts (such attire meant something deep to him that I never needed to ask about), dress shirts for work, old dress shirts for daily life around the house, mowing the lawn, leaning over a fence to joke with neighbors, chasing the bums who stole milk off our porch. Dad was a drinking man who worked all day selling metal in St. Louis, came home, had a couple of beers (Mom’s greatest domestic victory was when she convinced him to forgo scotch whisky except for the most special of occasions and stick to beer otherwise) and a ham sandwich, then drove back across the river to attend Washington University on the G.I. Bill. He was a dedicated student at night and never missed a day of work.
    He’d look up at me carrying that piss bottle in the wee hours and say something like, “Had economics class tonight, Alek—I learned that if you’re going to steal, you should steal a lot.” Or, “Have to read a whole goddam novel about baseball, only it’s not really about baseball, see, it’s about sad-assed stuff I already know all I need to know about, but there will be a test.”
    The house was a dinky box on a street of dinky boxes, with two bedrooms, one small, the other smaller. When visiting from West Table, which she began to do after the summer I had with her, Alma slept at the far end of the kitchen on an army surplus folding cot. The reconciliation with my dad seemed to have dismissed her focus, and she began to float languidly among her own pliant thoughts. Alma was almost hourly becoming less anchored to the day she was living and twirled into and out of days gone by or days she’d imagined. She often addressed us boys by the wrong names and I would answer to any of them, but the others wouldn’t, and an expression of agonized confusion would slacken her features as the correct names bounded into the summer weeds and hid from her.
    The house was mostly a riot by day. Mom worked till noon answering phones at St. Joe’s Hospital, and with Mom gone we boys ran amok—blasted the Animals, Chuck Berry,
Hot Rod Hootenanny
—bounced fat rubber balls off the ceiling, interrupted others on our party