Fall 2008  (Go back to current issue)

Low Country

by Lynne Huffer

“Mom!” I yelled. “Look what they're doing!”

It was a couple of months after we'd moved to our house on Telderskasse, a dark-brick two-story row house in a string of houses that all looked the same. I'd been sitting at the far end of the dining room, doing my homework, when I heard a thud against the plate glass window. At first, I thought a bird had hit it. That had happened before, the dull-colored sparrow trailing a tail of blood as it collapsed down the wall of glass. The flickering memory made me not want to look. But the thud was followed by another, and immediately following it, another. I had to look. Lifting my head, I saw two dark-brown smears smack in the middle of the sparkling pane. Behind the glass three boys from school stood peering over the back gate that led to the alley. Right as I looked up, one of them lobbed another clod of mud over the wall, and it landed again right in the middle of my mother's freshly washed window.

Mom, good Dutch housewife that she was, emerged from the kitchen, where she'd been sweeping.

“What is it?” she said, and I pointed at the window. In one short moment of recognition, she saw the boys, the mud, the full frontal attack on her sparkling handiwork. Grabbing her broom, she sprang into action, leaving the back door gaping behind her.

“Hoe durven jullie! How dare you?” she yelled. “Wait until I tell your parents!”

I don't know what she expected from them, but their tittering response only made her angrier. As the boys ran off, obviously amused by her accented Dutch, she dropped the broom and followed them out into the alley. Giggling nervously, they picked up their pace, furtively glancing over their shoulder for a hint of what Mom would do next. Their eyes widened in surprise to see that she had started running and was quickly gaining on them. This was something that a true Dutch housewife would never do. The boys broke into a trot, visibly alarmed by my mother's behavior. I'm sure to them it looked like madness.

My mother's not mad. She never was. She's just a jock, and the boys simply couldn't outrun her. I saw them turning a corner, Mom right behind them. By the time I poked my head around the corner where they'd disappeared, she was holding one of them by the collar, his entire face a gasp of surprise.

“Promise me,” she said, barely breathing hard, “beloof me… that you will never, ever do that again!”

Too frightened to speak, he simply nodded, but it was clear to me that he meant it. She released his collar, and he scooted away to join his friends. Mom returned to the house, emerged a minute later with paper towel and glass cleaner. The battle was over, and she had won. For the rest of the time that we lived in that house, those boys never stepped foot in our alley again.

This minor crisis in Mom's day-to-day life was a dress rehearsal for the events to come. Our sparkling, all-American family would see its share of mud. And my mother was scared, but, in the end, she chased down the things that tried to destroy her, grabbed them by the collar, and looked them in the face. It's not far-fetched to call her heroic.

At the time I did think she was crazy, running after kids like that, scaring them half to death. It embarrassed me, and it was even worse when I heard my friends whispering about it afterward at school. Of course, all of that kept me from noticing what was even more wrong in my family: my father.

It was 1966 and we'd been living in Leiden for over a year. We'd moved to the Netherlands so my father could do research in bone pathology at the university there. He was 30, fresh out of medical school, convinced that his imminent discoveries about bones would win him a Nobel Prize. The prestigious two-year sabbatical was just the kind of opportunity he'd been looking for.

One night, long after Mom had tucked us into bed, Dad came into our rooms—first my brother's, then the one that I shared with my sister—and shook us awake. “Come with me,” he said. “I have something to show you.”

We followed him downstairs in the darkness, where the coal-burning stove had grown cold. We were shivering but Dad didn't seem to notice. He led us into the kitchen, where he'd placed a small cardboard box on the table. Dad pointed his flashlight at the box, and we stood on our tiptoes to peer inside. There, on a bed of shredded paper, were three white mice huddled together in a corner. Their noses were quivering, making their whiskers move, and they were squinting at the light my father shone in their faces. My heart leapt with excitement. Three mice, one for each of us! I'd always wanted a pet—something furry and cuddly that I could love. They were all so cute, with their pink-tipped noses and perky little ears.

“Wow!” my sister exclaimed. “Where'd they come from?”

“From my lab.” His voice was gruff.

“They're so cute!” I said. “Can we keep them?”

“No, I'm afraid not.” My father paused, then continued. “These mice don't have long to live. You'd better get a good look at them now.” He turned his face away from the mice, looked us each in the eye, his own blue eyes lit up by something fierce at their center.

“Look long and hard,” my father repeated, his face stern as he turned it back toward the box. “Look long and hard, because after tonight you won't see them again.”

“Where are they going?” my sister asked.

“Back to the lab. First thing in the morning.”

Disappointment flooded my body, then settled in my chest.

“When you wake up tomorrow morning, these three will be gone. They're going back to my lab, where I'm going to kill them.”

The cold clamp on my heart grew tighter.

“But why?” my sister persisted. “Why do you have to kill them?”

“I'm a scientist,” he said, reaching down into the box to pet one of the mice. “That's my job.” He pulled his hand away, turned to face us. “After I kill them I'll cut them open. That way I can look at their bones.”

I imagined the mice, laid out on a slab, my father picking at their flesh to fish out the bones—tiny, white twigs like matchsticks. “That's my job,” he said. “These mice are going to make me famous.” He turned off the flashlight, then turned it on again, the mice like ghosts against the surrounding darkness. “Say good-bye,” he said. There were tears welling up in my sister's eyes, and at the sight of her tears, my brother, who was only two, also started to cry. I was six years old, the eldest of the three of us, and I knew my job. I put on a brave face and pushed the tears back.

Not long after that, one Sunday afternoon, Dad gathered us together—me, my brother, and my sister—and led us out the front door and down the front walk without so much as a word to my mother. He piled us all into the backseat of our VW Bug, started the engine, and hit the gas. We quickly gained speed, whizzing past apartment buildings and neat rows of brick houses, hurrying over a bridge, then another, past an open-air market.

“Where are we going?” my sister asked.

“Just be quiet and wait.”

We were leaving the outskirts of Leiden now, emerging into the countryside among the cows and sheep and flat, green meadows. We hadn't been driving long when, suddenly, we came to a stop by the side of the road. I looked out the window of the VW and saw a field dotted with grazing cows, the lush grass as tall as my brother.

“Get out of the car,” my father commanded.

One by one, we did as we were told. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a huge bull with fierce-looking horns less than 20 yards away. For some reason, in this particular spot, a section of fence was missing. My brother, my sister, and I moved to the back of the bright-red VW that had ferried us here, crouching behind it, our eyes now glued to the motionless bull. The car burned red-hot in the rare Dutch sun, and just behind it I could see the tips of the bull's horns glistening like steel.

“Go stand in front of the car,” my father ordered.

Wide-eyed, again, we did as we were told, huddling together as we circled around to the front of the car. The bull turned his head, looked straight in our direction.

“Hold still,” my father barked from his spot just to the left of where we were standing. “Hold very, very still.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “See this car? See what color it is?”

We nodded.

“You must be very still. Bulls are very dangerous.”

“Then why did you bring us here?” my sister asked.

“To teach you a lesson. Be very, very still.” He had that look in his eyes that I'd noticed the night he showed us the mice. “Be very still.” He pointed at our bodies, then at the shiny, red car behind us. “Bulls attack red things.”

We stood there, motionless, frozen with fear at the heart of the bull's-eye my father had created. We huddled there for hours, looking at death.

And where was my mother all this time? In that place where her eyes go when they roll back in her head? It was in Leiden, after all, that my mother first developed narcolepsy. Falling asleep allowed her to escape to a place far from horns and mice condemned to die. In some ways Mom was a child too. She was bound so tightly inside my father's deluded world, her only escape was inward. Theirs was a typical 1950s marriage, and my mother never thought to question what my father did or what he did to her or her children. It was his family, and he knew best. He was also clever—very, very clever. It was my father who taught me that insanity and intelligence often go together. At one point Dad even convinced the doctors that Mom was the sick one and needed to be institutionalized. They never locked her up, but I know for a long time, they actually believed him. She was just a housewife, after all, and they'd heard a rumor that she had threatened some neighborhood boys. She could be violent. My father, on the other hand, was a distinguished doctor. He was one of them: he had stature, an MD after his name, an irrefutable logic. Who could deny what he said?

Today I don't blame her for not doing more. The truth is, she plucked us from the heart of that bull's eye. What I know after the field is what my mother has told me: ambulance, straitjacket, my father yelling. They took him to Oestgoest, on the outskirts of Leiden. A padded cell.

I've forgotten all the Dutch I used to know, even though I spoke it daily with my brother and sister. But that word, Oestgoest, never went away. East Ghost. The ghost in the East. The place you go if you spend too much time looking at death.

* * *

Everybody in Leiden rode a bicycle: to work, to go grocery shopping, to visit a friend. I'd see people in business suits, dresses, evening wear, tall people, fat people, old people, children, whizzing around in all kinds of weather, along cobblestone streets, across bridges, through parks and busy intersections. My mother did what everybody else did and bought a bicycle not long after we arrived in Leiden. She used it for everything, and we called it “The Tank.” It was gray and heavy, with an oversized basket on the handlebars for carrying groceries. Somehow Mom attached herself to that bicycle in a way that she couldn't, at that point in her life, attach herself to us. It was almost as if “The Tank” gave her an identity before she could give herself one. She carried it with her back across the ocean after we left Leiden and kept it for years in our garage in Colorado, even after she'd bought a shiny new Schwinn to replace it.

Leiden was the way I imagined the inside of my father's head—blurred and gray but seething with violence. It was all held in by these fragile dikes that threatened to burst at any moment, but everyone went around as if it was perfectly normal to build an entire country below sea level. Maybe that's why they all rode bicycles: to accentuate the illusion of absolute confidence that never, ever would the power of that surge of ocean simply overwhelm them, sweep them off their feet, make them lose touch with the ground altogether.

“The Tank” was the exoskeleton of the fog-cloaked blur that was Leiden. It was the solid frame that reminded me, reminded all of us: this was real. It's a good thing Mom bought that bicycle. Rode it around, among the land mines and snipers—the mud-slinging boys and the lunatic husband. It was all so fragile, held in by mere stone and mud. But like the Dutch, she pretended not to notice the fragility of her existence—that it all could come crashing in on her at any moment. And it got her through. She brought it back, insisted on keeping it all those years after the ghost of Leiden had faded. Thank God for “The Tank.” Otherwise, we all would have convinced ourselves that Leiden never happened.

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