The Centaurus

I rebuked him sharply. “There isn’t time, you keep telling me.” I gathered up my books. Faded blue Latin, its covers all but unhinged. Smart red algebra, freshly issued this year; every time I turned a page, the paper released a tangy virginal scent. And a weary big gray book, General Science, my father’s subject. Its cover was stamped with a triangular design of a dinosaur, an atom blazing like a star, and a microscope. On its side and butts a previous possessor had lettered in blue ink the huge word FIDO. The size of this inscription seemed pathetic and abject, like an abandoned religious monument. Fido Hornbecker had been a football hero when I was in the seventh grade. In the list of names written inside the cover, where my own was last, I had never been able to locate the girl who had loved him. In five years, I was the first boy to be assigned the book. The four names written above mine-

Mary Heffner

Evelyn Mays “Bitsy”

Rhea Furstweibler

Phyllis L. Gerhardt-

had melted in my mind into one nymph with inconstant handwriting. Maybe they had all loved Fido. “Time stolen from food,” my grandfather said, “is time stolen from yourself.”

“The kid’s like I am, Pop,” my father said. “I never had time to eat either. Get your carcass away from the table is all I ever heard. Poverty’s a terrible thing.”

My grandfather’s hands were folding and unfolding gingerly and his hightop button shoes twiddled in agitation. He was an ideal foil for my father because as a very old man he imagined that, if listened to, he could provide all answers and soothe all uncertainties. “I would see Doc Appleton,” he pronounced, clearing his throat with extreme delicacy, as if his phlegm were Japanese paper. “I knew his father well. The Appletons have been in the county since the beginning.” He was sitting bathed in white winter windowlight and seemed, in comparison with my father’s bullet-headed shape bulking black against the flickering fire, a more finely evolved creature.

My father stood up. “All he does, Pop, when I go to him, is brag about himself.”

There was a flurry in the kitchen. Doors squeaked and slammed; hot claws scrabbled on the wood floor. The dog came racing into the living-room. Lady seemed to hover on the carpet, crouched low as if whipped by joy. Her feet in a frantic swimming motion scratched one spot on the faded purple carpet that was never so worn it could not release under friction further small rolls of lavender fluff-”mice,” my grandmother had called them, when this carpet lay in Olinger and she was alive. Lady was so happy to be let in doors she was a bomb of good news, a furry bustle of vortical ecstasy that in vibrating emitted the scent of a skunk she had killed a week ago. Hunting a god, she started toward my father, veered past my legs, jumped on the sofa, and in frantic gratitude licked my grandfather’s face.

Along his long life’s walks he had had bitter experiences with dogs and feared them. “Hyar, hyaar” he protested, pulling his face away and lifting his shapely dry hands against Lady’s white chest. His voice was shocking in its guttural force, as if it arose from a savage darkness none of the rest of us had ever known.

The dog pressed her twittering muzzle into his ear and her rump wagged so wildly the magazines began to slide to the floor. We were all churned into motion; my father rose to the rescue but before he could reach the sofa my grandfather lifted himself to his feet. We all three, while the dog swirled underfoot, pressed into the kitchen.

To my mother we must have looked like an accusing posse; she shouted at us, “I let her in because I couldn’t stand to hear her bark.” She seemed nearly in tears; I was amazed. My own anxiety for the dog had been pretended. I hadn’t heard her continue barking. A glance at my mother’s mottled throat told me that she was angry. Suddenly I wanted to get out; she had injected into the confusion a shrill heat that made everything cling. I rarely knew exactly why she was mad; it would come and go like weather. Was it really that my father and grandfather absurdly debating sounded to her like murder? Was it something I had done, my arrogant slowness? Anxious to exempt myself from her rage, I sat down in my stiff pea jacket and tried the coffee again. It was still too hot. A sip seared my sense of taste away.

“Jesus kid,” my father said. “It’s ten to. I’ll lose my job if we don’t move.”

“That’s your clock, George,” my mother said. Since she was defending me, I could not be the cause of her anger. “Our clock says you have seventeen minutes.”

“Your clock’s wrong,” he told her. “Zimmerman’s after my hide.”

“Coming, coming,” I said, and stood up. The first bell rang at eight-twenty. It took twenty minutes to drive to Olinger. I felt squeezed in the dwindling time. My stomach ground its empty sides together.

My grandfather worked his way over to the refrigerator and from its top took the gaudy loaf of Maier’s Bread. He moved with a pronounced and elaborate air of being in conspicuous that made us all watch him. He unfolded the wax paper and removed a slice of white bread, which he then folded once and tidily tucked entire into his mouth. His mouth’s elasticity was a marvel; a toothless chasm appeared under his ash-colored mustache to receive the bread in one bite. The calm cannibalism of this trick always infuriated my mother. “Pop,” she said, “can’t you wait until they’re out of the house before you start tormenting the bread?”

I took a last sip of the scalding coffee and pushed toward the door. We were all jammed into the little area of linoleum bounded by the door, the wall where the clocks ticked and hummed, the refrigerator, and the sink. The congestion was intense. My mother struggled to get past her father to the stove. He drew himself in and his dark husk seemed impaled on the refrigerator door. My father stood fast, by far the tallest of us, and over our heads announced to his invisible audience, “Off to the slaughterhouse. Those damn kids have put their hate right into my bowels.”

“He rattles at that bread all day until I think I have rats in my brain,” my mother protested, and, the psoriatic rim of her hairline flaring red, she squeezed past Grampop and pressed a cold piece of toast and a banana at me. I had to shift my books to take them into my hands. “My poor unfed boy,” she said. “My poor only jewel.”

“Off to the hate-factory,” my father called, to goad me on.

Bewildered, anxious to please my mother, I had paused to eat a bite from the cold toast.

“If there’s anything I hate,” my mother said, half to me, half to the ceiling, while my father bent forward and touched her cheek with one of his rare kisses, “it’s a man who hates sex.”

My grandfather lifted his hands in his squeezed space and in a voice muffled by bread pronounced, “Blessings on thee.”

He never failed to say it, just as, in the early evening, when he climbed “the wooden hill,” he would call down to us, “Pleasant dreams.” His hands were daintily lifted in benediction, a gesture also of surrender and, as if tiny angels had been clutched in them, release. His hands were what I knew best of him, for, the one in the family with the youngest eyes, it was my job to remove with my mother’s tweezers the microscopic brown thorns that on his weed-pulling walks around our farm would gather in the dry, sensitive, translucently mottled skin of his palms.

“Thanks, Pop, we’ll need ‘em,” my father said, wrenching the door open with a quick undercurrent of splintering. He never turned the knob quite enough, so the catch always resisted. “My goose is cooked,” he said, glancing at his clock. My mother’s cheek brushed mine as I followed him.

“And if there’s anything I hate in my house” she called after my father, “it’s cheap red clocks”

Safe on the porch, my father striding around the corner, I looked back, which was a mistake. The toast in my mouth turned salty at the sight. My mother, in the momentum of her last cry, went to the wall and, silent through the glass, tore the electric clock from its nail on the wall and made as if to dash it to the floor but then, instead, hugged it with its trailing cord like a baby to her bosom, her cheeks wetly shining. Helplessly her eyes widened, confronting mine. She had been a beautiful young woman and her eyes had not aged. Each day her plight seemed to startle her afresh. Behind her, her father, his head bowed obsequiously, his elastic jaws munching, shuffled across the floor back to his place in the living-room. I wanted to move my face into some expression of consolation or humorous communication but felt it frozen with fear. Fear for her and of her.

And yet, love, do not think that our life together, for all its mutual frustration, was not good. It was good. We moved, somehow, on a firm stage, resonant with metaphor. When my grandmother lay dying in Olinger, and I was a child, I heard her ask in a feeble voice, “Will I be a little debil?” Then she took a sip of wine and in the morning she was dead. Yes. We lived in God’s sight.

My father was striding across the sandpaper lawn. I chased him. The little tummocks raised by moles in warm