Beyond the Bedroom Wall by Larry Woiwode

Author:Larry Woiwode [Woiwode, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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There are some photos of Tim and Charles taken a few weeks later, by Jerome, most likely, at the front of the house. In the first, Tim stands at the entry, the white beams flanking it showing at the picture's sides, his truncated feet apparently on the concrete drive below. He wears a cap with GOLD BOND printed across its crown. His face looks puffy and strained and his smile is cleft by a half-moon-shaped shadow cast by his nose. His head is ensconced in the furry collar of their father's sheepskin coat. He holds his right arm up in a wave but his hand can't be seen. The coat's that big. The dark-colored bulk of him covers every crossbar of the screen and his head reaches to the base of the outdoor lights on the beams, the height of their father when he stands here. Tim's grown. The coat is buttoned down its front and has an elbowish bulge at its waistline. Grandpa Jones's goatskin chaps jut below its bottom hem into the picture's white border to

MAR • 51

In the second picture, Tim demonstrates modified duck lips, and has shrunk. His head is below the first mullion of the window in the entry, at the level of the screen-door handle. His arms are at his sides and the ends of the coat sleeves touch the concrete step. The coat overflows into the picture's border, as though Tim's deflating or melting or

MAR • 51

In the third picture, Charles stands in a dark parka with ragged cuffs. His legs are bowed out arch-comic-cowboyically, covered by the goatskin chaps. Beside him a white cat of Susan's with tortoise-shell crests around its eyes, and a tortoise-shell saddle, holds its mouth open in an arrested miaow, its tail blurred and the tip of it arched toward Charles: later, that summer, Susan and Marie put the cat in a traveling makeup case of their mother's— its mirror broken and its blue-silken interior in tatters— so they could pull it around in the wagon without its always leaping out, and then left it all standing in the sun, and as Charles was burying the cat in the back yard by the Incinerator in the makeup case it was found in, to their protests and tears and wondering why, he said, "Well, you see, it just sort of drowned on its own carbon dioxide."

A grimy right hand of Charles's is raised in the picture, in a rancherlike manner, and a pushed-out lower lip glistens above his depressed and wrinkled chin. His eyelids are lowered in an "It's all O.K. now, folks" gesture, and his straight hair touches his eyebrows and the top of his broad nose.

What's Jerome thinking at this moment out of this series of

MAR • 51

Charles's eyes are closed in the last picture, I notice again, and then, shuffling back, can't see Tim's eyes for the black shadow cast by the bill of the cloth cap in the second one; and in the first, the

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