Ethel

Content warning: This story contains depictions of domestic violence and sexual content.

Ethel married Jimmy Fletcher when she was sixteen and he was twenty-two, the same year that Roosevelt won in a landslide. They drove across state lines in the dead of night and she came back the next day, a married woman. Her mother and dad seemed relieved that she had gotten hitched, figuring that there was a baby on the way—which there was—but her sister Hazel had cried. Ethel scolded her and told her it was time to grow up. But the truth was, she had felt a little pang of regret when she went to get her things from the bedroom she shared with Hazel and saw their dolls there, still lined up on the bed.

Very quick-like, she had her baby girl, Rose. Boy, that kid had cried. And Jimmy lost what little charm he had, a no-good drunk, it turned out, who ran about the countryside, often ending up in jail. He showed up now and then, demanding to be fed, then he’d shove her around when he didn’t like what she cooked. Of course he’d climb onto her in bed and flounder around for a minute or two like a drowning man—he was worthless in that regard too. Most of the time, he left her penniless. Shopkeepers would knock on her door wanting money for bad checks he’d written. So Ethel got a job at the Chicken Inn, a honkytonk out on the edge of town. By this time, her sister Hazel had found a no-good husband for herself, so Ethel told her to come and wait tables with her. Their mother did not like that her daughters worked there. The place was, she said, full of wild-eyed drunks who cared neither about church nor state. Of course this was true. It was a rare night that Ethel didn’t see at least one patron get a bloody lip or a black eye.

In the light of day, in the summer, green hills rolled out from the place for as far as the eye could see. She would sit there and look at all that green while she was plucking the chickens. Hazel would be there plucking chickens alongside her, and they would talk and smoke while they plucked. Now that was something she wished they had listened to their mother about, that evil smoking, as it would eventually kill Hazel, leaving Ethel to grow ancient on her own. But she was glad she had not listened to her mother about the Chicken Inn. Oh my, that place was fun. At night, the wooden floorboards creaked with dancers. Sometimes there were fiddlers and yodelers, and sometimes a swingy tune with a fat man pounding on the piano. Wild men would drag race up and down the gravel road out front. Ethel often was the one to drop the flag, and on clear nights, she could look up into the sky and see the Milky Way spread out up there like a blessing. Like divine permission. Like a kiss.

The man had shown up out of nowhere one hot night on the late edge of summer.

Not a regular—a stranger.

Hazel leaned into Ethel when she saw him and said, “I bet that one has spurs that jingle jangle.”

And Ethel said, “Yippy yay.”

You see, in the years since she had married Jimmy Fletcher, Ethel had met a man or two who had shown her what that was really about.

Hazel said, “He’s got his eyes on you, Sister.”

“He’s got his eyes on everyone,” Ethel said.

“No,” Hazel said. “He’s got his eyes on you.”

“Well, maybe I should see if he jingles,” Ethel said.

Jimmy was a pale, doughy man, and the last time she had seen him, he had busted out a front tooth. But this man. He had a splash of dark hair that fell over his forehead, and big brown eyes, and all his teeth too! And Hazel was right. Ethel had caught his eye. Wherever she would go in the room, his gaze would follow. So when she brought him a beer, she leaned over his back and put her hand on his neck when she put the glass on the table. She saw the expression on his face change from levity to seriousness just like that.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“I’m Ethel,” she told him. “What’s yours?”

He told her his name.

But that name slipped from her mind a moment later, as names tend to do.

That night a bunch of them had gone out for a drag race. Ethel dropped the flag, and when she looked over after those cars took off, there stood that man. And he looked as good standing there as he had looked inside. He smiled at Ethel as the others whooped and hollered, and before she could think twice, she walked right up and touched his arm. And then she kept walking, made a motion for him to follow. He did follow.

For she had a key to the room downstairs where they kept the kegs and the brooms. She led him there, and she locked the door behind them. And there she turned toward him and put her mouth on his pretty lips. It sure surprised her when he knelt before her and put his head up under her skirt, but she leaned back against a shelf full of cleaning rags and bleach and hung on. I can’t wait to tell Hazel about this, she thought, and then didn’t think much else, because his mouth was like a little bee that had landed on an opened flower. And all she could think about was that little bee. Like the flower had just been there waiting all this time for that particular bee. It bloomed open and open and open, until Ethel didn’t think it could open any more, but it did. Then down came his trousers. As the floors above them creaked with dancers, they nearly knocked that shelf over.

No drowning man, that one.

Why he had been drawn here on this particular night and never again, Ethel did not know. She felt sometimes in the years that followed that he had been blown in by some sacred wind, pulled there toward her for this moment and only this moment. This place had its magic. He had his magic, and he left a bit of it with her while the lightbulb flickered above their heads. Then they separated, and he looked at her with such wonder and said, “Ethel, you are one hell of a woman.”

She said, “And you, sir, are one hell of a man.”

Because she could not remember then if he was Frank or Joe or John or what he had said exactly. It didn’t much matter to her right at that moment. But about three or so weeks after that, she told Hazel, “Sis, I think I got knocked up by that man whose spurs I jingled down by the kegs.”

“What makes you think that?” Hazel asked with her blue eyes wide.

“I’m late,” she said. “And I chucked up my breakfast this morning. Yesterday too.”

“Uh oh,” Hazel said. She reached out and poked Ethel on the breast. “That hurt?” she asked.

“Yes, it does,” Ethel said.

“Well, that’s it then.”

And they talked about the woman they knew of, over in Union County, who could help her out, but Ethel put her hand on her belly and thought about that night and that man and said, “I don’t know. I think I will have this kid.”

Not Jimmy’s kid.

Her own kid. Conjured by her own wild essence, by the force of herself. She was a married woman, after all. She could have a baby if she wanted.

There was a problem, though. Everyone knew Jimmy had not been around for four months at least. She and Hazel thought it through, and they decided the best course of action was to go two counties over where they knew he was and to bring him home for a day or two to cover her tracks. They took their father’s car and drove over there and hunted him down at the bar where he was sitting. Ethel walked in and put her hands on her hips and yelled, “Jimmy Fletcher! It’s time for you to get home.” And she made sure she looked good too, which was not hard at all. And all the men in the bar laughed and slapped Jimmy on the back and he took it as a boost to his ego. He stayed for a couple days, got cooped up and drunk and started shoving her around. That is when she put a skillet upside his head and stunned him. She grabbed her little girl Rose and burst out of the house before he got his wits back, and then Ethel’s brothers ran him off again. But that was enough to make her child legitimate.

Jimmy did show up one more time.

He’d lost another tooth, the fool, and he didn’t have a dime in his pocket. But he’d gotten word that he had a son and he wanted to see him. He looked at the brown-eyed kid, and he looked over at Ethel and his brow creased. But she just stared him down and said, “Ain’t he a cutie, Jimmy?”

He didn’t say a word in protest. Maybe to keep his pride, who knows. But she never saw Jimmy Fletcher again. Next thing she heard about him, he was in the penitentiary for hot-wiring a car. And a few months after he got out, she got news that he’d driven a truck off a bridge in an accident so violent that they had to go hunting for his head.

Now, instead of being the wife of a ne’er-do-well, she had the respectability of a widow. The way the butcher nodded to her and called her “Mrs. Fletcher.” The way she could show up at the wedding of a cousin with her head held high. Sometimes when the church folks spoke to her kindly, she would whisper to Hazel, “There goes Jimmy Fletcher’s head again.” And as the image of Jimmy slipped further from the consciousness of those who knew him, the safer her secret became. Ethel’s mother searched her mind and decided the child looked like her grandfather, and that explained his handsome face enough for everyone. There was something special about that boy, everyone could see it. He grew tall, and he liked to read books—and maybe, like his daddy, he was pulled forward toward adventure. As soon as he could, he made his way into the world. He went west to California, grew his hair long and marched against the war. Ethel would get postcards from the mountains, letters from the ocean. All of them said the same thing. “I love you, Momma.”

Now even that was long ago.

Ethel’s great-grandchildren were learning how to drive, that’s how damn old she was. These descendants called her sometimes, mostly putting her to sleep with bland questions about what she had for lunch. She didn’t hold it against them. The young must believe that they will never grow old, and therefore they cannot imagine that the elderly once burned hot. Sometimes she would talk about old times, though—about Hazel and the Chicken Inn. Her grandchildren would listen while they stirred their dinner on the stove a thousand miles away. She told them about the fat man who pounded on the piano, about the drag races, about plucking chickens. She even told them about beaning Jimmy Fletcher with a cast-iron skillet. “You should have heard how it rang!” she would say. “Even I saw stars!”

But the rest of the story? That belonged only to her.

Susan Montag is a writer and artist living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She has an MFA from Hamline University, and has published three books, most recently a chapbook titled Jenny, 52 from Redbird Chapbooks in Saint Paul. 

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Editor’s Note:

Thank you for reading Susan Montag’s “Ethel.”

Old age has a way of making a person’s history seem more settled than it actually is. To younger generations, the elderly often appear to have been old forever, their lives reduced to familiar anecdotes, family photographs, the occasional scandal retold at Thanksgiving. The possibility that they once possessed desires as urgent and unruly as our own requires an imaginative effort we seldom make.

Montag restores that urgency to Ethel with marvelous irreverence. There's true pleasure in the story’s refusal to make her respectable, even as respectability becomes one of her most useful possessions. A disastrous marriage gives her a surname; widowhood gives her standing; a single night with a stranger gives her a son whose existence she claims entirely for herself. Ethel knows all too well how to manipulate the social arrangements governing her life.

Yet the story’s deepest pleasure likely comes from its treatment of secrecy. Ethel’s descendants inherit the consequences of a night they’ll never know about. Their family history contains an act of extraordinary defiance, preserved in the most ordinary form imaginable: a mother who raised her child.

By the end, Ethel has outlived nearly everyone who might corroborate her story. She alone remembers what happened, and she alone decides what it means.—Jon Negroni

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