“Dear Jep,” said his father, “you won’t marry anyone.”
But oh yes he will said his mother, and by the time Jeptha Arrison was twenty he was a married man and by the time he was twenty and a half he was a widower. His wife, Bessie, had been a schoolteacher, had loved him with an antiseptic, what-will-I-do-with-you love. She liked especially to tuck him into bed with fierce hands like hoes that jammed bedclothes around him. “You cozy, Mr. Arrison,” she’d say. They’d been married for six weeks when, while in Baskertop Square, they stopped to look at the men constructing the monument on top of Bledsoe Hill, one of the two hills that had survived the leveling of Salford. The monument was a tower to commemorate a Revolutionary War battle that Salford had supplied the guns for; it looked like a saltshaker. “Almost done!” said Bessie, and at that moment the masons on top of Bledsoe Hill lost their grip of a cart holding a block of granite. It roared down the hill and, in almost a deliberative way, took Bessie out of the square and married her to the tobacconist’s wooden Indian and sent them both—Bessie, the chief—through the tobacconist’s glass window in a calamitous shatter.
Left-behind Jeptha gasped on the sidewalk. He’d been holding her pocketbook. He still held it.
“Glory!” said a woman who’d seen it happen. She tried to take the pocketbook from him, as though he’d stolen it. For a moment he even thought she was Bessie, come back to claim what was hers: the purse, her Jeptha. About the same womanish shape, and Jeptha was awful at faces. Then he saw she was older, and redheaded, and herself: she tugged and he tightened his hold and they wrestled till the woman said angrily, “You’re bleeding!”
His knuckles were scraped, one toe was broken, that’s how close he came to dying. He couldn’t even get dying right, he told himself later. He’d let her die alone.
All his life Jeptha had confused the word widow and window and now here they were: he was a windower. He wanted the murdering block of granite as a headstone but the city wouldn’t let him. He would have carved it with the words BESSIE ARRISON. ALMOST DONE. Instead they trucked the stone back up and put it in place, and they trucked Bessie to the morgue and the cemetery. He didn’t know what happened to the Indian. Her people put up a little marble cenotaph that said:
BESSIE
BELOVED DAUGHTER
& WIFE
“Beloved wife, too,” he told his motherin-law, and she said, “Yes, that’s what it says.” She pointed at the BELOVED, then at the WIFE, as though grammar could explain. “Most beloved,” said Jeptha.
Oh, he knew he upset people. Bad enough when he was Only Jeptha; troubling when he was Jeptha Married and sharing a bed with a woman; once he was Jeptha Bereaved he was untouchable. He worked at the track—his father had a friend—but in the canteen. He was a man apart and knew it. Even the horses started to look at him cow-eyed. To watch your wife die before you! People were suspicious of him so that they would not have to pity him. Even the horses. Especially the horses. In his grief he swallowed aspirin and was sent to the hospital, where he found Bertha Truitt. She took him in, built the bowling alley around them both.
There, he was just big-headed Jeptha Arrison: who imagined he had a past? Always Jeptha, ever Jeptha. Only his parents saw, in his fastidiousness with the pins, his exactitude and grace, a man recreating the world, ten pins at a time and ten frames a string, all day long till the lights went out. A man born for love.
LuEtta Mood, at home, nursing the baby, tried to conjure Bertha Truitt up: what she might have said to the man who insisted he was her son. There was no Bertha to him. He was leather and gristle, mean-eyed, lazy. Anyhow it was Dr. Sprague who’d left the alley to him. Bertha might object. She might have chosen somebody else. A woman. A collective of women. LuEtta herself, even. Why would Bertha Truitt allow her beloved bowling alley to be owned by a man? She only ever seemed passingly interested in the male sex: she loved her husband, and Jeptha Arrison. Ordinary male Salfordian bowlers she ignored so far as she could, though she had a soft spot for the men returned from the war, who’d lost part of an arm, all of their hearing. They were nearly noble enough to be women. When it came to most men, she took their money and turned down their advice. The former they were stingy with; the latter, profligate.
“He says men need a place they can come together without women,” Joe Wear had said. But wasn’t that the whole wide world? Where did women have? Truitt’s had been hers for all her grown-up years, even if her teammates had fallen away. Indeed, perhaps women did not need a place to come together but to be alone. That’s what Truitt’s was to her: a thunderous place where she could think in peace. A place her husband hated.
She was, still, an excellent bowler, the baby on her back where she couldn’t see him but could feel him breathe and so knew he was alive. She had forgotten how many minutes of motherhood were devoted to this question, even before Edith’s accident. Alive now? And now? The deeper Edith’s sleep the shallower her life, it seemed. The extraordinary stillness of a sleeping baby! Look for breath at the stomach, flush at the cheeks. Then LuEtta would leave the room, come back. She lost hours to the question. Alive now, now, now?
These days she didn’t have hours. She strapped the rude baby to her back. Away from the bowling alley she dispensed love to him through every part of her body, her neck and face and breasts and stomach. At Truitt’s she let her disinterested back pick up some of the mothering. He was an animal, asleep. She bowled well. You should never have to give up something you’re good at.
She met her old teammate Hazel Forest at Coop’s Tearoom. “It’s unbearable!” said Hazel. “I haven’t been in a year or more, but what would Our Bertha say?” Hazel was old, but with children still little: she had an exhausted air of experience, someone who thought a lot of things but actually knew very few. If you asked her how to make a cheese soufflé she would tell you about the rivers of blood running down the gutters of Paris during the French Revolution, as though you should be able to divine a recipe from that.
“We’ll chain ourselves to the ball returns,” said Hazel.
“You can’t bowl in chains,” said LuEtta.
“We’ll take up space. We’ll interfere. They want a quiet place to gather as men? We won’t let ’em. We’ll get cymbals. Horns! Hatchets.”
“Hatchets?” LuEtta said in a panic. “We don’t want to destroy it.”
“Why not? It’s not ours anymore. Why preserve it?”
Why not? It was Bertha’s place. She’d left it to them. Bertha was four years dead, and LuEtta’s love for her was spilled molasses. Before the spill she’d known she’d owned it, up on a shelf, contained and unopened. Now it was everywhere, it got everywhere, the stick and smell, the uselessness because spilled. You talk of that woman too much, Moses Mood told LuEtta as she read about the lawsuits against the Purity Distillery Company, owners of the burst molasses tank. She wanted them to pay for killing Bertha, though she didn’t want the exact dollar value of Bertha’s life calculated by lawyers. She’s dead, said Moses. That was true. And I am alive. LuEtta wasn’t sure. Some days she thought she’d married a man killed years ago by a bullet, dead but still talking.
“What good does ruin do?” LuEtta said to Hazel at Coop’s Tearoom. “If we want to be allowed—”
“I’ve seen that man. That is a man who hates women for their very womanhood. He is the Devil.”
“We might change his mind.”
“He would rip himself in two before changing his mind,” said Hazel. “Bertha marched.”