Burnt Biscuits

A pit forms in my belly. My knees grow wobbly, and I feel faint but force myself to harden as I hold Junior in my arms. It’s a Goddamn cold one. I invited him inside, but he shrugged it off with the frigid breeze and returned to his wagon—a chicken bone in his throat. I tell Mama, but I’m not sure she hears me or that she is even home, and I sit Junior into the wagon and climb in myself. The horse digs her shoe at the frozen ground—the rickety wagon has seen better days amongst the ghostly backdrop of winter fog. The journey is silent, all but the crack of a whip and the occasional, “Hey, now,” and caw of a winter crow, for all but the hooves trotting along and the creaking of the old wagon. I feel I have seen better days. I kept our faces covered from the chill.

The farmhouse is small, and the roof looks like it might cave in soon. Hardly any paint left to peel—bleached, dull timber. Richie’s pa helps us down from the wagon, and I feel trapped as the gate shuts on my heels. I am hesitant to enter, afraid of what I might find on the other side. But Junior’s cherry red cheeks leave me but little choice. Inside, the air is warm but smells horribly of onions. Richie’s pa hollers at six or seven children to “Go on an’ get!” And they do, scattering like roaches under the floorboards. Then Richie appears like a phantom from the wall but sat in a corner near a smoldering log in a chair. I fall into his arms, but wait, his arms hang loose and free at his side.

“Richie...?”

Our child snug between us—I almost drop him and cry as I sit Junior in his lap, only to see him fall to the floor with a soft thump. Junior doesn’t cry and sits up all on his own. I back away as though I had just touched a corpse. My hand over my mouth as I try not to vomit—Richie is as pale as the old house. His pa goes on, and then his ma, where he leaves off, that the doctors said there seems to be a lot coming back subject to sudden moods, tempers, fits of profound melancholy, alternating with a restless desire for pleasure, and moved quickly to passion. But I don’t see any force at all. For that matter of fact, I don't see any Richie at all but a skull wrapped in greyed ham. She goes on about how the Army doctors sayin’ they’d basically lost control of themselves, become bitter in speech, violent in opinion, and downright frightening. But I don’t see any of this—I don’t see anything, but a corpse propped up in a chair beside a smoldering log.

Doctors said many coffins and the bodies within were pushed off planks at mid-sea, plunging into the ocean to drift away. The day Richie was ordered to assist, his hands became so shaky he dropped his end of the box, and the body of a young boy fell out at his feet—that Richie collapsed. Furthermore, Richie succumbed to sitting silently in the corner of the ship's deck—motionless—empty-eyed—absent-minded—face shriveled in the light of day—whispering into the darkness of night. Utterly incoherent in speech, Richie moaned and muttered nonsense, spewing profanities at the sky, until he ceased to speak altogether by the time they’d reached the San Francisco Bay.

“Never knew my boy was a coward—” says his pa.

Richie’s eschewed, hallowed eyes are more adrift than that of death itself. As death is simple and straightforward, while what sits before me dwells deeper in the shroud of the abyss of the strangeness of that of the hell of the lost mind.

“But he’ll be back to his old self in no time,” says his ma.

“Nope. He’s ruined,” says his pa, “can't even wipe his own ass."

An icicle, so much so that I am afraid to touch him again, for he might shatter to my feet in slivers that melt before the mantle. The crackling jitters my nerves as the silence grows long between absurd remarks. The absence of songbirds raises dreary along with it all, and my left ear begins to ring. His ma goes to the kitchen and returns with a platter of biscuits. She offers me one, but I politely decline as I can scent their charred bottoms. When she places one in Richie’s lap, I watch it tumble to the floor, and an old mutt come out of nowhere and gobble it down. Junior giggles and I am sickened.

“You’ll come ‘round, ain't that right, Richie?” said his ma, messing his hair, his eyes empty, and going two different directions, as if disconnected from any type of central connection. His pa grumbles, and I don’t care what for. My heart hurts, and I fear I might be amongst this rotten stench of onions. I lean onto the wall for balance, and I feel I may push the whole house over with me. My head inflates. I, too, am now empty and lost, but my fingers quiver, and I stand on my own two feet. I have the sense to sense this surrounding nightmare that has wrapped itself around me in a yellowed flowered paper that curls at the seams. I see a leafless tree out the window, desperate for a branch to hang from.

“Richie once broke an apple in two with his bare hands,” says his pa, a distant reality suddenly as hard to swallow as a burnt biscuit.

I look into Richie’s vacant eyes as Junior crawls about the old mutt drooling on the floor by the crackling log. A frosted-over window with a diagonal crack running from corner to corner reflects at me in the glaze, and I see deep into the bleak countryside that is being erased by the cataract of winter.

I turn back, and the room shrinks even smaller as Richie’s ma says, “That there’s the winda’ Richie broke that time he ran away from home—”

“Hell, most likely to shake up with you,” says his pa.

“Found all dem letters of yers in his ruck, and well, we learnt ‘bout the boy and all,” says his ma. “Pa, go on an’ get dem letters!”

Pa grunts but does as he’s told, and he returns with a towering stack of envelopes.

“Ya sure does gotta lot to say for a woman, doesn’t ya,” he says, handing them off to me.

“Can I hold the boy?” asks his ma, and it is somehow not until now I notice she is pregnant.

“Yep, lucky number seven,” says his pa taking notice. “They say number seven, the smart one—makes all the riches.”

A poor man will have many children, I think.

And we all faced Richie in his chair, Junior leaning back against the pregnant belly of his grandma, Richie’s pa shaking his head in disappointment, saying sarcastically, “Yep, it’s a good Richie made it on back ‘ere in one piece to help out ‘round here,” and scuffs and snorts and repositions himself in his chair.

I hold the tower of letters pressed between my chin and my palms. He then flicks Junior’s nose and tugs on his ear, and Richie’s ma gives him a burnt biscuit, and I watch in horror as Junior shoves the blackness into his little mouth. I looked up at a crucifix hung from a nail on the wall just above Richie’s head and a Bible that sits open on a small table beside his chair-coffin. Psalm xxiii, but I can't recall it. I sit the tall stack of letters down on the floor, and they tumble over, and the mutt jumps to his paws and scurries off. And I suddenly notice Richie’s pa has a red, wrinkled neck. I think of my own pa, his aching back, a toiler of the earth, resting in the ground, in a real coffin. Richie’s pa takes Junior into his own hands and bounces him on his knee a few times but quickly yawns and stands him on his feet, placing a penny in his palm. Junior then stumbles straight for the front door, and I want to follow, but Richie’s ma hops up and stops him in his tracks by the britches, and I never see that penny again.

I kneel at Richie’s side as his pa asks, “Has the boy fallen outta bed yet?”

“No,” I say.

“Ought to soon ‘nough,” he says.

“Ya ought not wanna let Junior suck his thumb like that,” says his ma, “he’ll end up with teeth like his grand-pappy—mouth like a mule.”

The wind whistles through the crack in the window. Richie’s cheeks are sunken in, and his eyes are wrapped tight with dark circles, his lips thinner than I remember, not those I had kissed by the river—most certainly not the same lips.

“Yeah, I stitched up that quilt for the new one but figured Richie could use it for the time bein’,” says his ma, in a long breath, rasp with char.

I stare deep into those eyes of his, those eyes once sparkling with sunshine—a deep fog has rolled in, a window frosted over with ice, creaking in the unforgiving wind, howling with no mercy upon the bleak frozen fields of time—a brutal cold—a frostbitten heart—my Richie has become winter. They say hell is burning hot, but they are wrong. Hell is cold. Hell is a man frozen solid, once a boy warm with the blood of youth and passion rushing through his veins, cheeks rosy, limbs strong. Hell is purple fingers and blued toes. I lift the quilt and rub his feet to warm them. I snuggle his feet warm and wrap them back up in the quilt.

I shiver as Richie’s pa mutters under his breath, “Boy musta saw himself a kraut broad in the nude to lose his damn mind, way he done—”

As his ma looks over at me with a wrinkled brow, it is at this moment, as her forehead relaxes, as her posture sinks back into her chair, as she turns away, I know she has relinquished her motherly duties to her son. With her first breath in weeks, she rubs her growing belly and gums on a burnt biscuit.