Shitty was another word. But it was a bad word.
The Dunphy children pleaded with their mother: when was Daddy going to come back to live with them?
Except not Luke. Luke who was the oldest did not plead with Edna Mae or with anyone. In silence Luke listened to whatever faltering words their distraught mother said to placate them but the expression on Luke’s face of profound sadness and rage suggested that he did not believe a word poor Mawmaw said.
“Daddy will be home soon. There will be a trial—and then Daddy will come home.” Edna Mae paused, lightly panting. She smiled and her damp eyes moved in their sockets with halfhearted levity. “It’s a secret just now but Reverend Dennis is saying the Governor can ‘commute’ the sentence—if there is one. The Governor is a strong Christian believer in Right-to-Life.”
More than once over a period of months and eventually over a year following their father’s arrest Edna Mae would utter these thrilled words in more or less the same way evoking the Governor of the State of Ohio; and Dawn would crease her young forehead into a deep-ribbed frown asking, “And then—what? Daddy will come home?”
“Daddy will come home.”
“But what does ‘commute’ mean, Mawmaw?”
Commute. It was a strange word you would never hear except possibly on TV, or in a courtroom. Commute.
“It means what it says! The Governor has the power to bring Daddy home even if there’s a trial. No matter how the trial turns out.”
Edna Mae was exasperated. The subject was closed.
And yet, Edna Mae’s words hovered in the air. For there was something fearful in these words which the children did not want to consider—the thought that, in this new crowded place where they’d moved to stay with Edna Mae’s aunt Mary Kay Mack in her one-story shingleboard house on the outskirts of Mad River Junction, there was no room for a man of Daddy’s size.
There was no room for a man at all.
“WHY DO THEY DO THAT?”—it made her angry for some reason, possibly it was a joke, some stupid joke of boys, like when the boys at school waggled their tongues in their mouths in-out, in-out and burst into monkey laughter the girls did their best to ignore.
“Do what?”
“That.”
Angrily she pointed overhead. In Mad River Junction in her aunt’s neighborhood on a stupid steep hill she stared upward at the offensive sight in the power lines: frayed old sneakers attached by their laces, flung over the power lines and dangling like disembodied feet.
First days they’d moved here, on Depot Street, one two three she’d counted them, fucking stupid sneakers, four five times she counted them, craning her neck, grinning upward and her heart racing in fury.
“Yah, it’s kind of weird. Stupid.”
“Who does it?”
“Who? How’d I know?”
No one could explain. Dawn was exasperated, for the sneakers drew her eyes upward repeatedly and involuntarily and appeared to be perfectly good sneakers no filthier or more frayed than her own.
Also she had reason to dislike Mad River Junction for the air smelled of creosote from the sprawl of a train yard at the foot of their aunt’s hill. And no one knew them here as they’d been known in Muskegee Falls before what had happened to their father so all that was said of them was Those new people, you know—Luther Dunphy’s family that had to move here.
Or—That crazy guy who killed people in Muskegee Falls with a shotgun, they put away in the nuthouse. His wife and kids.
SHE WAS THIRTEEN years old. And then she was fourteen.
Made to transfer from the Muskegee Falls school to the Mad River school she’d been kept back a year. She had hated the Muskegee Falls school but after Mr. Barron had been shot (it was explained to her) there was such dislike of the Dunphys in Muskegee Falls they could not continue to live in their old house even though (it was not exactly explained to Dawn but she understood) the St. Paul Missionary Church and “donors” from Army of God were helping out financially while their father was not able to provide for his family.
But Dawn had worse problems in the new town with “reading comprehension” and “writing skills” than she’d had back in Muskegee Falls. Arithmetic was now called math, a dizzying swirl of numerals that made her feel nauseated.
It will be best for your daughter to repeat eighth grade. That way she will have a solid foundation to build upon, to advance.
Luke too would’ve been made to take his year over, tenth grade in high school, but Luke was sixteen which was the legal age to quit school in Ohio and so shrugged and told them fuck it he was quitting, he’d had enough of crummy shitty school.
Dawn did not want to quit school—not yet. She did not want to displease Daddy at such a time.