The Beans of Egypt, Maine Read online

  “Ain’t my business, Earlene. Ain’t your business.”

  Earlene is in her midteens. She has a long, pale neck, pale eyes, and tiny nervous hands. She wears a little sleeveless top with a print of tiny kittens.

  Cole Deveau is wearing his warden’s hat, the hair on his huge neck gleaming thornlike and gray. He wears a gun that hangs on his thigh.

  “Now, wouldn’t you think Mr. Deveau would take the day off when he’s not feelin’ good, Daddy?”

  “He’s a devoted lawman,” says Lee Pomerleau.

  “Wait’ll Gram hears this!” Earlene exclaims, then whistles sharply. “Somebody is in trouble at Beans’!”

  “It’s about time,” sighs Lee Pomerleau, rubbing his back. “Hope this is the big dragnet that’s come ta scoop ’em all up.”

  “Here comes another sheriff, Daddy. Can you believe this?”

  “Earlene, sit down and stop starin’ . . . Praise the Lord.”

  “Daddy! I can’t help it!!!”

  One of the deputies reaches through the open window to the cab of a truck and pulls a carbine from the gun rack. He pushes a few cartridges into the loading gate.

  “WOW!” gasps Earlene.

  The warden’s walkie-talkie spits and clicks.

  “Daddy, don’t you think Mr. Deveau oughta be in bed?”

  Lee Pomerleau sighs. “The day old Deveau takes a day off will be a cold day in . . . you know where.”

  “Yuh, but Daddy . . . he can’t prack-tickly walk!”

  Lee Pomerleau blows his cheeks in and out a time or two. “That man is so devoted, he’d nab his nanna if her nose looked like an undersized salmon.” Lee chuckles to himself, then falls silent again, his body very still.

  A deputy, who is picking his nose, abruptly looks alert. Up on the paved road, Rubie Bean’s loaded truck swishes through the low-hanging bare maples, grinds down onto the right-of-way. He’s coming to have dinner with his mother. There’s no shadows. Rubie Bean is as good as a clock. When he comes to eat dinner with his mother, you know it’s noon. When you hear those brakes hiss, the gears snatch and rake, you know it’s time to set the table.

  Rubie Bean backs into the Pomerleaus’ crushed-rock driveway, an inch or so from Lee Pomerleau’s little car with the ACCEPT JESUS AND YOU SHALL HAVE EVERLASTING LIFE bumper sticker. The picture window ripples. The NO TURNING IN DRIVEWAY!!!! KEEP OUT!!!! sign, very faded, flaps on its lathed post in the sudden breeze made by the truck.

  One of the deputies tosses an empty Fresca can into the Beans’ yard. It rolls to a stop among the plastic toys.

  Cole Deveau looks through the windshield of Rubie Bean’s old truck: Rubie’s fox-color eyes meet Cole Deveau’s eyes, which are underneath his mirror cop glasses.

  “Daddy! Get up ’n’ see this! Somethin’s gonna happen.”

  “I don’t want to see it. It’s just another tacky day in the life of the Beans,” says Lee Pomerleau.

  Rubie revs the engine of his truck. He looks down through the spotted windshield at the warden moving stiff-legged toward him, the assorted others also closing in. The deputy keeps the carbine close to his body. Another deputy pulls a gun with a worn strap off the seat of a pea-green car. Cole Deveau’s handgun rides his leg. The sun flashes on his mirror glasses. Every bit of flesh not covered by his uniform shows up the color of canned plums.

  Rubie revs the engine again. He makes the loaded truck buck and rock. The mountain of logs sways ominously.

  Lee Pomerleau says, “What’s going on in my driveway?”

  “All them cops comin’ our way.”

  Lee Pomerleau sits up. “Why’re they comin’ here!”

  “They’re gettin’ ready to arrest Rubie Bean, looks like.”

  Lee Pomerleau turns the gold afghan in his hands. “It’s about time. Praise God! Praise Him!”

  Earlene looks into her father’s eyes. “Praise Jesus,” she says softly.

  Cole Deveau points his plum-color finger at Rubie Bean.

  Rubie Bean’s mustache hangs heavy as a cat over his twisted teeth. His green felt hat is wet around the crown. He isn’t wearing a shirt, just a frazzled blue bandanna around his throat. Over the truck door where it says RUBIE BEAN LOGGING, EGYPT, MAINE and his telephone number, his tawny left arm hangs, the long and short fingers spread.

  Again he makes the truck rock crazily. Exhaust churns through the Pomerleaus’ open windows, fills the room.

  The state police talk into their car radio before getting out. Then the two of them slide out into the heat.

  Cole Deveau walks stiffly in front of the truck and stands before the dented grille, pointing up at Rubie. The other guys spread out, one tripping over the Pomerleaus’ wee gardenia bush.

  Both state cops have drawn their revolvers.

  Rubie pushes open the door of the truck, stands on the running board. His chest and arms are white-hot, glassy. He hangs from the door frame.

  Cole Deveau’s voice is strained, like Donald Duck’s: “Okay, Bean! Maybe you’re ready now?”

  All the lawmen squint. The purply red of Rubie’s rig and the steamy glare of his body are too much for them. Rubie crouches.

  Earlene whispers, “Rubie’s goin’ ta jail.”

  Lee Pomerleau stands up.

  Rubie drops, arms spread. He scrambles around on all fours among the ankles of the lawmen. The deputy with the carbine tries to take aim. Handcuffs appear in a state cop’s hand. Another man springs at Rubie with both hands, but Rubie is slippery, slimy. Hands come from all directions . . . trying.

  Cole Deveau finds Rubie’s felt hat next to the Pomerleaus’ wee gardenia bush. He raises his foot and stomps it.

  The deputy with the carbine raises the short barrel and punches the butt between Rubie’s shoulder blades. Rubie goes down with his face in the crushed rock.

  Another deputy draws his foot back and gives Rubie his boot to the cheekbone, while at the same time another guy is kicking from the other side. Rubie’s head and neck give a shudder in the middle. But he flips to one side, spits on the deputy’s boot.

  Then, just as Lee Pomerleau comes to the picture window and puts both hands on the glass, Earlene says, “Daddy,” in a whisper.

  Rubie climbs up the front of Cole Deveau. Cole Deveau stiffly closes his arms around him the way sweethearts embrace in reunion, Rubie’s face gashed and liver-colored. They stand eye to eye in stock-still silence, both faces wrecked and colorific. One of the state police deftly yanks Rubie’s hands behind his back and clinks on the cuffs.

  “It’s about time,” says Lee Pomerleau. “Now maybe they’ll hog-tie the rest of them heathens.”

  “Not the babies and little kids!” Earlene croaks.

  “Yes, all of ’em. Get ’em while they’re harmless. Before they’re full-blown Beans.”

  After they all drive up the right-of-way, Rubie Bean’s truck with the door hanging open is still chugging in the Pomerleaus’ crushed-rock driveway. Nobody comes for it for a long while.

  5

  AT THE CHURCH with the square steeple there are only two men who sing well. Cole Deveau is the big one. He stands in the back with his pastel dress shirt rising and falling upon his bearlike but tuneful bellows.

  Earlene Pomerleau sits with her father and grandfather in the front row. She wears a little pink, child-sized sundress, and her hair splays over her back. She smells of the hot steam iron. Her small shoulders are endearing.

  Lee Pomerleau holds his face in his hands, the pain in his back and legs a dull red.

  The congregation sings madly. Gram Pomerleau plays the organ, the narrow shoulders pumping, the white curls pumping, the feet in black prescription shoes running over the pedals.

  Earlene’s eyes move in long, rolling waves around the room, returning over and over to the warden.

  Nobody else seems to look at the warden. The congregation acts like nothing’s different. You hear a few “Praise Gods” here and there. One or two moans. Meanwhile, Cole Deveau sings hoarse and toothless. All t
he way from the corners of his mouth to each ear are the uncountable tiny stitches. Where are the eyes in the black-and-yellow wreckage of his face? He holds his hymnbook inches from his face.

  Earlene squeezes her eyes shut. “Praise Jesus,” she says. She can feel her father jiggling his leg next to her leg.

  Earlene says, “Daddy.”

  He gives her a sharp look.

  “Daddy,” she says.

  “What?”

  “I’m goin’ ta be sick.”

  “Do it outdoor,” he says.

  6

  OUTSIDE, THE RAIN is smoke-colored and cold. Cole Deveau’s bride sits on the seat of the new gray truck, knitting, as usual. Nobody in the town of Egypt knows her name. Cole Deveau never speaks of her, never brings her inside. You never see her at beano or in the drugstore waiting and pacing with all the others for the pill bottles to be filled. You only see her in his truck, knitting, knitting up a storm.

  Earlene Pomerleau dashes through the rain, her hair a white flash. She dives into her father’s little car, slams the door. “Phew!” she gasps.

  The rain thuds all over the car.

  Earlene paws through the bag of groceries her father picked up along the way. She finds a jar of black olives. “My favorite!” She eats the olives and listens to the rain. She switches on the windshield wipers. Slisk. Slisk. Slisk.

  Now she sees the gray truck parked facing her, with Cole Deveau’s bride in it. Earlene chews the olives and watches the bride’s rain-blurry face. “What a queer-actin’ woman.”

  The rain thrums. Earlene slowly chews. The pits have built up in her cheek.

  Earlene blows the car horn. The bride seems not to notice, although her eyes are on Earlene.

  Earlene blows the horn again.

  Nothing. The woman is raising one hand with the knitting needle in it. With her longest finger she dabs at the corner of one eye.

  Earlene giggles. Blows the horn again.

  The woman’s hands working the needles show the frequent glint of a wedding ring. Her skin is too white, like cake frosting. Her dress is a charcoal-color satinish stuff with charcoal-color satinish covered buttons.

  “Creature Feature,” breathes Earlene. She eats another black olive. The bride keeps staring straight ahead.

  “Maybe she’s blind,” Earlene whispers to herself. “Or unfriendly.”

  Earlene notices the bride is knitting mint-colored baby booties. The woman turns her head slightly, but her eyes come short of Earlene’s face. The woman’s lips move, counting stitches.

  “Havin’ a baby, Mrs. Cop??!!” Earlene screams.

  The rain thickens.

  Earlene positions two olives over her eyes and they are like a pair of binoculars. She peers through the holes at the warden’s truck, the warden’s bright new inspection sticker, the warden’s license plate, and the warden’s woman.

  Earlene’s Yellow Hair

  SINCE THE STROKE, Earlene knows Gram’s body by heart. She rubs her with cornstarch every morning and arranges her in the wheelchair in her new violet print dress or one of the other dresses, always steam-ironed. Tied to one armrest is a loud silver bell, which Gram rings if Earlene gets too far off in the house.

  Earlene’s small wallpapered bedroom is upstairs. She leaves the door open at night and imagines every sound is Gram’s bell.

  Today is the hottest day in memory. They sit together in the sticky gloom of Gram’s screened piazza. Earlene smokes filter cigarettes while her father is at work. Gram hates cigarettes. And of course God hates cigarettes. Back when Gram could talk she said a million times, “Tobacco is the work of Satan. It wasn’t a Christian that invented tobacco, was it? No sirreee! It wasn’t a Christian. It was them wild Indians . . . planted it everywheres . . . and the worst of our lot took it up. Don’t you know your history?” And then she would bellow in her big voice, “YEA, DOGS ARE ROUND ME! A COMPANY OF EVILDOERS ENCIRCLE ME! DELIVER MY SOUL FROM THE SWORD, MY LIFE FROM THE POWER OF THE DOG! SAVE ME! SAVE ME! PRAISE THY POWER!”

  Gram likes it when Earlene reads the Psalms, over and over and over, the favorite ones . . . and Ecclesiastes of Wisdom and Folly Compared . . . and when Earlene hums hymns or tries a few stanzas in her Minnie Mouse voice. She is singing now between long drags on the filter cigarette.

  Earlene’s father drives into the yard in his new yellow VW Squareback, home early because of the heat. The construction company he works for has the lowest bids on three new schools. This means no layoffs for at least a year. Lee seldom sleeps, never tires. Earlene drops her cigarette through the floorboards on the piazza. Gram moans.

  Lee Pomerleau crosses the yard with his khaki shirt around his waist, a bag of groceries in each arm. When Gramp died, Lee sold his other house, came here to be in charge of grass cutting, in charge of repairs. He is more exacting than Gramp ever was. The old place has taken on a new bright look.

  Earlene rocks nervously in her upholstered spring rocker: woinka woinka woinka. Her father pushes the screen door open with his knee. He glares at Earlene as he passes. His eyes are pale like dimes. “Who’s been smoking?” he asks Gram. Gram moans. “Has Earlene been smoking?” he asks. Gram closes her eyes.

  He puts the groceries away.

  Earlene pats Gram’s hand.

  He comes out and sits on a green-painted rocker but doesn’t rock, just jiggles his leg and blows his cheeks in and out. He has just run cold water over his face and hair.

  Earlene hums a hymn.

  Roberta Bean’s wee blue house is on the same side of the road. All the Pomerleaus turn their heads to the left as the tall woman strides across her yard with a basket of green tomatoes. She is barefoot and wears a thin, worn-out housedress with print nearly the same hue as the green tomatoes. She arranges some of them on a card table on the shoulder of the road. She unfurls a stained blue-and-yellow beach umbrella to shade the tomatoes and other produce, then places her folding chair in the sun. She sits, picks up her sewing. She crosses her ankles. Her feet aren’t bony like the rest of her. They are staunch and silver-color, and the long toes handle the grass like deft fingers.

  “I wouldn’t buy a three-cent radish from that insane woman,” says Lee Pomerleau, jiggling his leg furiously.

  Earlene rocks: woinka woinka woinka.

  Gram feels the skirt of her new violet dress with the fingers of her good hand.

  Before Roberta Bean, giftlike, are the peppers, eggplants, red tomatoes, ears of corn with copper-color tassels, summer squash, green beans, wax beans, and a cardboard sign: VEgtiBles 4-sale CHeaP.

  As cars pass on the road, Roberta Bean looks up from her sewing and gives them each a long, hammering stare. She wears no hat, just an egg-sized black bun right on top, and a ring of tortoiseshell combs.

  In the thickness of this summer day only she looks un-sticky.

  “There should be a law that after you’ve had nine kids and no husband, you get the knife,” Lee mutters. He looks into Earlene’s eyes. “They call it tyin’ the tubes.” He points at the tall woman with his thumb. “Hers . . . They should cut ’em, then tie ’em in twenty knots.”

  Earlene looks at her father’s red face, the jiggling leg.

  In the tall grass, Roberta Bean’s two most recent babies toss and toil in a seething giggly pile . . . nude . . . both of them . . . right by the road. One scampers forward on all fours . . . the other falls to its back . . . both males, their privates wagging. Yet sometimes all that is recognizable of their anatomies is four grass-stained feet.

  A logging truck makes its slow, growling ascent up the grade and Lee Pomerleau gives an annoyed red, red look in that direction. The truck hisses, pulls to the shoulder, stops. The doors open. Two men get out, one a Letourneau Earlene remembers from school . . . He wears a messy T-shirt, his elbows are smudgy, his crew cut has a bald spot. The other man is Beal Bean.

  Earlene stops rocking. She closes her mouth in a tight, self-conscious line.

  Beal wears aviator sunglasses, the darkest kind, and a
railroad cap. As he crosses the road, he wipes his bare chest with a dirty bandanna. It is hard to tell where the hair on the chest begins and the great hulking beard ends.

  Lee Pomerleau stops puffing his cheeks.

  Earlene’s deepest wish is for a cigarette.

  From her seat in the sun, the tall woman raises up on her toes to stretch, worrying her body back and forth, baring her broken teeth in an ungracious leer as if she were waking from a nap alone in a small room.

  Beal stands in front of the vegetable stand and runs the dirty bandanna into one of his ears.

  Earlene’s eyes slide down, and she sees that her father is barefoot. He has perfectly shaped feet, the nails lavender crescents, always clean.

  Beal Bean and the Letourneau lean into the shade of the umbrella and paw around in the baskets of the tall woman’s perfect vegetables.

  Seeing the men, the babies dash to their mother and engineer themselves into a heap on her feet. Two of her older babies come to the open door of the wee blue house and look into the light.

  Beal Bean turns from the umbrella with a red tomato. Then he feels in the front pockets of his dungarees for loose change, each coin warmed by its closeness to his body.

  “Hot enough for ya?” Beal yells over the snarl of the idling truck.

  One baby throws grass at him. Beal laughs.

  Roberta doesn’t speak but only watches Beal hard.

  The Letourneau studies the tall woman with awe. She is taller than either man. His eyes rest on her silvery feet, her most beautiful part. One baby makes popping noises with the walls of its mouth, pats its mother’s feet. The other baby snatches a balled-up paper towel dangling in the grass, hurls it at the Letourneau, but the thing only arcs crazily back into the grass.

  Beal Bean feels in his pockets for more change. Warm pennies. He puts his hand out. The pennies are brand-new, almost pink. The babies’ eyes grow bigger than pennies. They approach Beal on tiptoe as if to steal the pennies from his hand . . . one penny to each baby . . . one quick darting swipe.

  “There, by God, you’re rich now!” Beal tells them. “Don’t sp-speeeh-e-spend it all in one place.”