Watching Matthew

I’M BLIPPING OUT OF THAT place, the dormhouse or whatever you call it, and in two ticks I’m up in the sunlight, getting a bird’s-eye view of Dog River. I can see the two white frame houses side by side near the corner of Eighth and Columbia, each with a half-enclosed porch about big enough for a burial. The front of the house on the right, where our parents live, has two windows, one of them closed by heavy drapes; it’s like a witch-face with one eye open and one shut.

I can tell by looking that it’s the summer of 1933, when you’re ten years older than I will ever be, Matt Kolb. There you are, all by yourself at the back of the strip of lawn between the houses. You’re driving a post into the turf, using a croquet mallet for a hammer. Beside you is the croquet set in its rack — another post, five more mallets and six balls striped around their middles black, red, yellow, green, white, orange, one color for each.

Later you’ll fill out, but now you’re a skinny kid with horn-rimmed glasses and a lot of hair. Just above your hairline is a scar where Father says you fell down when you were a baby. You’re frowning as you work. If you think you’ve made a mistake, you grab your own nose and wobble it fiercely. You’re learning Latin and German from Father, but he thinks you don’t get enough exercise.

When you’re finished with the first post, you pick up the other one and take it to the front of the yard. You kneel there and move the second post back and forth by half-inches until you have it lined up with the first post and the standpipe in the middle of the lawn. You’re trying to get it mathematically precise, like Mother when she sets the dinner table with knives and spoons.

You hold the second post in position while you get to your feet, then hammer the post in firm and straight. You rub the back of your neck as you walk to the rear of the lawn that means you have felt my presence, but you don’t know what it is; you just think you have a prickle in the back of your neck.

I follow you behind the house, past the garden with its neat rows of bean frames and tomato tepees. At the end of the driveway the garage doors stand open, and the space inside is orderly in deep shadow. Everything here belongs to Father, and everything is in its place. On one wall, behind a padlocked door of heavy fencing in a wooden frame, hangs a cabinet full of tools. Everything sharp is in there — hoe, shovel, pickaxe, axe, hatchet, garden trowel, even the scissors and kitchen knives. If you wanted to take any tools, you’d have to get through the fencing with wire cutters. The catch is that if there were wire cutters anywhere in the garage, they’d be in the cabinet.

Nearby in an open bin are a pair of brown-stained gardening gloves and two stakes made from scrap one-by-twos. The pointed ends, roughly shaped with a hatchet, are blunted from being driven into the dirt so many times. Father uses the stakes to lay out his furrows in the garden, and you use them too by special permission. The stakes are tied together with twine, and the twine is wrapped around one of the stakes in a large egg-shaped lump.

I blip up again, and as I drift above the houses I can see children converging from three directions. Leroy McKenzie and another boy are running together down Eighth Street toward the back yards; Ted Underwood and Rick Hogan are on their way from the dead end of Columbia Street, and Neola Collier is just emerging from the yellow house across the way.

By the time I get back, you’ve run the twine from one croquet post to the other, wrapping it around the standpipe in the middle of the lawn. The standpipe is a piece of iron pipe that stands up about a foot off the ground, with a valve and a hose connection at the top. The valve always drips a little, no matter how hard you turn it off.

Leroy and his friend walk up together. “Who’s this?” you say.

“He’s my cousin. His name’s Pete Bryan. Can he play too?”

“I guess, unless there’s too many.” You run the twine back to the first stake again, halve it to find the center, and put a wicket there. Neola comes up the lawn, then Rick and Ted, and they all stand watching. You put two more wickets at either end, then a wicket all the way over to one side, midway between the middle and end wickets, and another opposite. Then two more just like them in the other half of the court.

You look at your watch. “Okay, let’s start. Pete, you know how to play?”

“No.”

“We’ll show you. Pick a color and take a mallet and ball.” The other kids already have theirs, and the only color left is black.

“Okay, put your ball a mallet’s-head length from the first wicket, see, like this. Now just knock the ball through these two wickets. You get one more shot for each wicket you go through.”

Pete hits the ball awkwardly and it bounces off the first wicket. “Do I get to go again?”

“Not right now. Wait till it’s your turn.”

The game proceeds decorously, according to rule and custom, until Rick Hogan knocks his ball through the first two wickets and hits Pete’s ball. He moves his ball next to Pete’s, puts his foot on his own ball, and whacks it so hard that Pete’s ball flies down to the end of the lawn. Then Rick hits Ted’s ball, takes two shots, and gets into position behind the side wicket.

In the next round Rick goes through the two front wickets, hits the post, goes back through the same wickets and hits your ball, knocks it the length of the court. Hitting other players’ balls and going through wickets, he winds up in front of the end two wickets. You try to hit him from your corner of the field, and miss.

Rick goes through the last two wickets, but instead of hitting the stake, knocks his ball away from it and becomes a rover. He hits your ball and knocks it to the front of the court, hits Leroy’s ball and slams it the other way, hits Pete’s ball. Ted and Neola go over to him, and Ted says, “Hey, you don’t have to hit everybody all the time.” Rick pushes Ted, who falls over the standpipe and hurts his leg.

Rick’s cheeks are flushed. He turns, raises his mallet like a golf club, takes a full swing and knocks the black ball bouncing across the street into the Colliers’ yard. Then he throws his mallet against the side of the house and walks away. The others watch him moving slowly, straight-backed, up the middle of the street out of sight. “What’s the matter with him?” Pete asks Ted.

“You know his dog Rex?”

“Yeah.”

“He got funned over by a car. Rick’s brother Oren went and shot Rex with his gun, and Rick didn’t want him to, so he’s mad.”

They hear a rapping and look up. The curtain has been drawn back in the comer window and they see the pink-jowled face of Mother there. Her eyes are bulging with anger, one more than the other. She shakes her finger at them and drops the curtain.

“Is that Matt’s mother?” Leroy asks.

“Yeah. I seen her once before, Like this, through the window.”

“She never goes downtown or anything?”

“No.”

Ted is up, Limping a little. All the kids are walking away now. In a few minutes they’re all gone except Neola, who brings you the black ball that Rick knocked into her yard. The ball is split halfway around the middle, showing its brown pressed-wood interior. The croquet set is ruined. You’re taking deep breaths, trying not to cry.

“Sorry,” Neola says.

“Okay.”

Neola walks back across the street, goes into her house and closes the door. You begin gathering the wickets and posts. You pick up the stakes and twine and put them back in the garage. You carry the croquet set through the back porch into the kitchen, where the worn linoleum shows the edges of the warped floorboards underneath. No one is there, but through the open doorway you can see Father in the living/dining room, grading papers at the table. Father looks up. “Good game, son?”

You do not reply. This is always the way it is; I think I’m going to make it come out different this time, but that never works. When you open the basement door, a cold air breathes up. I follow you down the dusty unpainted stairs; you put the croquet set under the stairs where it belongs, then climb up again to your lonesome room, but I keep going all the way to the back of the basement, under the dirt, down through the black darkness to that place, whatever you call it. Where the little bones are.