Free Buried Child by Sam Shepard Page B

are you going?! Upstairs?! You'll just be listenin’ to it upstairs! You go outside, you'll be lis-tenin’ to it outside. Might as well stay here and listen to it. (HALIE
stays by the stairs. Pause.)
Halie had this kid, see. This baby boy. She had it. I let her have it on her own. All the other boys I had had the best doctors, the best nurses, everything. This one I let her have by herself. This one hurt real bad. Almost killed her, but she had it anyway. It lived, see. It lived. It wanted to grow up in this family. It wanted to be just like us. It wanted to be part of us. It wanted to pretend that I was its father. She wanted me to believe in it. Even when everyone around us knew. Everyone. All our boys knew. Tilden knew.
    HALIE : You shut up! Bradley, make him stop!
    BRADLEY: I can't.
    DODGE: Tilden was the one who knew. Better than any of us. He'd walk for miles with that kid in his arms. Halie let him take it. All night sometimes. He'd walk all night out there in the pasture with it. Talkin’ to it. Singin’ to it. Used to hear him singing to it. He'd make up stories. He'dtell that kid all kinds a stories. Even when he knew it couldn't understand him. We couldn't let a thing like that continue. We couldn't allow that to grow up right in the middle of our lives. It made everything we'd accomplished look like it was nothin’. Everything was canceled out by this one mistake. This one weakness.
    SHELLY : So you …
    DODGE: I killed it. I drowned it. Just like the runt of a litter. Just drowned it. There was no struggle. No noise. Life just left it. (HALIE
moves toward
BRADLEY.)
    HALIE:
(To
BRADLEY) Ansel would've stopped him! Ansel would've stopped him from telling these lies! He was a hero! A man! A whole man! What's happened to the men in this family?! Where are the men?!
(Suddenly
VINCE
comes crashing through the screen porch door up left, tearing it off its hinges. Everyone but
DODGE
and
BRADLEY
back away from the porch and stare at
VINCE,
who has landed on his stomach on the porch in a drunken stupor. He is singing loudly to himself and hauls himself slowly to his feet. He has a paper shopping bag full of empty booze bottles. He takes them out one at a time as he sings and smashes them at the opposite end of the porch, behind the solid interior door, right,
SHELLY
moves slowly toward right, holding the wooden leg and watching
VINCE.)
    VINCE:
(Singing loudly as he hurls bottles.)
“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. We will fight our country's battles in the air on land and sea.”
(He punctuates the words “Montezuma,” “Tripoli,” “battles,” and “sea” with
a smashed bottle each. He stops throwing for a second, stares toward right of the porch, shades his eyes with his hand as though looking across to a battlefield, then cups his hands around his mouth and yells across the space of the porch to an imaginary army. The others watch in terror and expectation. To the imagined army.)
Have you had enough over there?! ‘Cause there's a lot more here where that came from!
(Pointing to the paper bag full of bottles.)
A helluva lot more! We got enough over here to blow ya from here to Kingdom come!
(He takes another bottle, makes the high whistling sound of a bomb, and throws it toward right porch. Sound of a bottle smashing against a wall. This should be the actual smashing of a bottle and not taped sound. He keeps yelling and heaving bottles one after another.
VINCE
stops for a while, breathing heavily from exhaustion. Long silence as the others watch him.
SHELLY
approaches tentatively in
VINCEí
direction, still holding
BRADLEY
’s wooden leg.)
    SHELLY:
(After silence.)
Vince? (VINCE
turns toward her. Peers through the screen.)
    VINCE: Who? What? Vince who? Who's that in there? Is someone in there? (VINCE
pushes his face against the screen from the porch and stares in at everyone.)
    DODGE: Where's my goddamn bottle?!
    VINCE:
(Looking in at
DODGE.) What? Who is that? Who's