Monthly Story (July '24): Church Mice

Fiction

Ella, being older, knew things the rest of them didn’t. She said they were poor as church mice, and that’s all her brother Gary could think about when she killed that mouse. He stood and watched the small gray thing not even as big as his hand scurry back and forth along the baseboard as she chased it into a corner and stabbed it with the broom handle. A bright red gush of blood like a tiny ribbon of river came out its mouth and one little sparkling bead of an eye dangled on a thread. So they were that poor. And living in the big old falling down house down by the river, too, where every window rattled in a wind and they had to put pots and pans down to catch the rain coming through the roof, not their house before Daddy went away, which wasn’t old and had a play room for the little ones and a patio with stone benches you could sit on and a long yard that Daddy mowed with his shirt off and a tall hedge so nobody could see what they were doing.

But Ella killed that mouse and he remembered what she said about how they had never eaten Scrapple for breakfast before—poor people’s food, she called it, given them by the county, handouts—but now they had to and sometimes before Mother got paid at the hotel they ate bread and milk with sugar in the morning. Mother said Daddy went to Heaven. Gary knew what that meant and he didn’t cry even on the day the grown-ups got dressed up and went off to say goodbye to Daddy and he and the other little ones had to stay behind at Uncle Phil’s and their cousin said Daddy shot himself and Gary slugged him and his cousin turned all red and sweaty and went crying to Leon who stayed behind to watch the kids because maybe he’d already said goodbye to Daddy. It felt good to slug his stupid head cousin. Even Leon laughed. But that’s why they moved down by the river, because of Daddy. They’d liked that other, nicer, house with the stone patio and the tall hedge, but he liked the house by the river, too, with the canal in the front and the river in the back and the two giant oak trees there by the front door and the rhododendron bushes he could play under to make a fort and even crawl behind the lilac and honeysuckle and suck the stem of the sweet little honeysuckle flowers. And he and Patrick could go across the canal bridge to play in the woods. So he liked this place even if Ella didn’t and said they were poor as church mice and Mother had to walk up the towpath to that hotel every morning to make beds and clean toilets and run the vacuum because they didn’t have a car anymore.

That summer, a man came and opened an ice cream shop on Canal Road right near their bridge. Mother said she thought that was odd because nobody ever drove by there and the man—Benny—didn’t have a business head if he did that. Gary looked at Benny and tried to see what was different about his head and couldn’t tell. He had kind of a round face with not too much hair and always a big smile with his eyes that looked like they were laughing and he gave them ice cream and they didn’t have to pay and they could choose what kind they wanted, vanilla, chocolate, raspberry, or coffee. They got cones, the four of them—he, Ella, Patrick, and Ivy, the baby, who Ella had to always take care of—and ate their ice cream at a picnic table under the trees at the edge of the gravel parking lot Benny said would be full of customers’ cars any day now. Benny asked them all about school and their friends, even if they kept telling him they didn’t have any friends in this new place and living away from everybody who had nice houses and a mother and a father and always looked at them funny because of what had happened. But Benny was nice. He was always happy and kind of chubby like he ate too much ice cream. Mother said he gobbled up all his profits and that’s why he didn’t have a business head. But they only saw him eat ice cream and sometimes the hot dogs he tried to sell, too, although they never saw people stop to buy any of that. Mother said his brother, Lou, who came around with bags of dollar bills that he counted in the back room and then wrote things down in a book—she said Lou had the business head and she was pretty sure she darned well knew what was going on there. Gary looked at Lou’s head, too, and couldn’t tell. He was taller and skinny and he never smiled like Benny did but he was nice though. Give the kids all the ice cream they want he told Benny. And the hot dogs. Give the kids anything they want. Make the other people pay if anybody ever shows up.

So they liked going over there even if Mother told them not to bother Benny so much. After all, she said, he was trying to run a business, but Mother went to work every day at the hotel, and they liked to go see Benny, who didn’t have anything else to do but talk to them or read comic books. Even Ella came because Ivy always wanted ice cream and would cry. Lou came every couple of days and always said the same thing. Give these kids anything they want, so they ate lots of ice cream and hot dogs that summer after Daddy went away. Sometimes when Benny made them hot dogs or scooped out ice cream for them, he made some for himself, too. When Lou saw that, though, he yelled at Benny and told him to sweep the floor or wipe the kitchen clean, what if somebody came? We aren’t playing here, he’d say, so Benny would jump up and get busy for a while and then sneak himself something to eat. He brought his glove and ball to play catch with Gary and Patrick and he let them take turns using his glove and said he’d bring Philly’s caps some time and one day when Lou came with his bag of dollar bills he brought the caps and a couple of gloves made for kids. It was before the end of the month and they were eating relish sandwiches at home. Ella must have told Lou because Lou got Benny busy making hot dog sandwiches. You get going for a change and make these kids something to eat, he told him. And put away that comic book, too. We have to do something with all this stuff. That’s the way he talked. Giving orders kind of tough, but never with the kids, only with Benny, who Mother said was a ne’re do well and Lou was trying to make something of him.

That’s what things were like that summer. They played along the river, finding junk that floated down like waterlogged footballs and driftwood and once a rowboat with a hole in the bottom. Patrick found Ivy a doll with no head, and they liked to throw a stick or a piece of bark into the canal and then bombard it with rocks and clods of dirt. When they told Benny they did that he said that would perfect their pitching arms. He said they could nail a runner on first and then on third, a double play, so that’s what they pretended doing. Nailed! they’d yell with a good throw. Then one afternoon playing catch with Benny and eating hot dogs this car rolled across the gravel. Two men in suits sat in it looking at the scene for a while not saying anything. Then the doors opened. It was a big shinny car. Black like it had just been washed that morning. And the way the men were dressed was like the car. Dark suits and ties, like Daddy used to wear when he went to work. One of them tried to look scary when he stepped out of the car and sucked in his belly. Benny whispered to Ella don’t tell them nothin’. He tried to smile at them but it wasn’t real. You could always tell when Benny smiled. But the men didn’t even look at him. They looked at the kids, especially at Ella because she was the oldest, ready to start junior high. You live in that house over there? They used the right last name and Mother’s first name. Ella looked at Benny but then said yes. The man wanted to know if Mother was home and Ella said no, she’s at work. They didn’t believe her so they got back in the car and drove across the bridge and stopped in front of the two oak trees and went up to the front door and knocked. When nobody answered they went around looking in the windows. Later that day they came back and Mother met them outside. She wouldn’t let them come inside. They stood real close to her so you couldn’t see her behind their suits and they all talked in low voices. When they left they gave her a piece of paper that she twisted in her hands as she went upstairs and closed her bedroom door. Later that night she called Aunt Beth, her sister, and talked for over an hour on the phone in the kitchen. Gary listened from where she couldn’t see him on the curling steps that went upstairs from the kitchen to the second floor. In a while Ella came and sat with him.

After Mother got off the phone, he sat by the living room window watching for that car to come by again on Canal Road. He was pretty sure he saw it go by again but Ella told him not to be such a worry wort and that nobody could get blood from a rock. He didn’t know what that had to do with it but he knew she said it to make him feel better and tried not to keep looking out the window anymore. Ella was always trying to do that and he could tell she was also trying to make herself feel better, too. Then that night in bed in the attic where he and Patrick slept in the same bed he had that thing again where something is there in the dark and if you pull the string hanging over the bed the light bulb will come on and you will see what it is but you can’t move your arms or legs and your eyes are wide open and you know it’s there right over by the corner by the door so even if you could move your arms and legs you still can’t run out the door and down the stairs. It’s not those men but it’s like that and he lay like that for hours and woke up in the morning and nothing was there but the corner by the door and on the other side of the room the window where you could see all the way to Benny’s.

There were other times too when different men came to talk to their mother. They stood real close and talked in almost whispers and then Mother went off by herself after that and they all knew—well, maybe not Patrick and Ivy, but Gary and Ella—they knew it was something bad about why they had to live there and not in that nice house before Daddy went away. Daddy went away was something Mother said because she didn’t want to say he was dead. Gary figured it out by listening on the curling stairs and by sitting on the front steps where she couldn’t see him when Aunt Beth and her sat on the living room couch talking. So he knew Daddy had put all his eggs in one basket and then lost his shirt when the bottom fell out. He couldn’t figure out what that meant even though Ella tried to explain it to him, and even she couldn’t figure out what they meant by the ponies or playing the numbers, but he knew it was bad and he lay in bed at night in the attic feeling that thing in the corner had something to do with it.

Then one afternoon he and Patrick put on their Philly’s caps and took their new baseball gloves over to Benny’s place and the three of them were playing catch while Ella and Ivy sat at the picnic table under the trees eating hot dogs and Lou was in the back room counting dollar bills and writing in his book. A big black car like the other ones came along and pulled right up to where they were playing so they had to stop and get out of the way. A second car just like it pulled off the road and waited. Both cars had two men each in the front and they just sat there for a little while. You could hear the ticking underneath the first car because it was a real hot day. Benny tried to smile at first but you could tell he didn’t want to. He looked in toward the back room to get Lou’s attention, but Lou had his face down close to the page he was writing in. Then the doors opened on the first car and a man got out the passenger side. He wore a suit like those other men, but not a white shirt. His was black and his tie was loose like Daddy’s had been after work when he sat under the circle of light at the dining room table with his cigar and a bottle of beer and with the newspaper spread out full of pictures of men who had been arrested and one Gary remembered was a man dead on the floor of a restaurant. The man who got out of the car was bald. The driver was having trouble getting out because he was so fat his stomach got stuck on the steering wheel and he said a word they weren’t supposed to say. The fat man’s feet kicked like a baby’s while he freed his belly from the steering wheel and you could see the hairless pale skin of his legs. He stood up saying that word again and trying to stuff his shirt back into his pants. The other man already stood looking past Benny to where Lou sat in the back room. Benny held the ball and watched both men. He didn’t throw it and he stopped trying to smile. The first man looked over at the fat man and pointed to Benny with his chin. The idiot brother, he said, and they both laughed. Get me a hot dog, idiot brother, the fat man said and Benny went inside and came back with a hot dog in a bun. You want ketchup with that, he said, and both men laughed at him. By this time Lou saw them and he stood up and closed the back room door. You could hear the lock go. The fat man bit off half the hot dog and threw the rest on the ground as they both headed for the door. Shit, he said with his mouth full. The first man walked around to the back of the building while the fat man went inside and tried to open the back room door. When it wouldn’t open he kicked it and the door sprang open.

But he didn’t need to do that because his partner came back from behind the building with his hand grabbing Lou by the shirt collar. Benny’s eyes were closed. The fat man went and took Lou’s book and the bag of dollar bills and put them under the front seat of the car. The other one opened the trunk and made Lou climb into it. Then they drove away. The second car pulled up and the back door opened. Now you could see a third man in the back seat. You, too, somebody said, and Benny took a step toward the car but then stopped. He leaned down toward the kids and put the ball and his glove on the ground before getting in, like he knew exactly how to do it. He made sure not to look at them.

Mother didn’t say anything when they told her what had happened. But that evening after they’d gone to bed she walked over to Benny’s and filled a shopping bag with all his hot dogs and buns and ketchup and mustard. She must have made a second trip for ice cream. Much later that night, Ella woke up and screamed. They all came running down the stairs in their pajamas and gathered under the oak trees by the front door, where Mother stood eating ice cream out of a cereal bowl and watching Benny’s burn down. The reflected flames turned the canal water red and the sparks disappeared through the trees and into the stars. And every night after that, unable to move his arms and legs, Gary knew that the fat man sat crisscross in the dark attic corner and, dreaming wide awake next to Patrick, Gary heard Mother’s voice on the kitchen phone pleading with Daddy to please please please finally answer her questions.