CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

Saunders begins Isabelle with the line: “The first great act of love I ever witnessed was Split Lip bathing his handicapped daughter” (27). Saunders’s unnamed male protagonist is a boy at the story’s start, and he describes himself and his friends as “young,” and “ignorant of mercy” (27). Split Lip, the father of the handicapped child, whom the boys call “Boneless” or “Balled-Up Gumby,” is a policeman. Split Lip’s wife has left him due to the difficulties in raising their daughter. The wife has remarried, and “together they made a little blond beauty,” who the wife and her new husband “paraded up and down the aisle at St. Caspian’s while Split Lip held Boneless against him in the last pew, shushing her whenever the music overcame her” (27).

The narrator describes Boneless as looking like “a newborn colt, appendages folded in a she lay on the velour couch protected by guardrails” (27) as Split Lip bathes her. The narrator and his brother, Leo, watch this occur by standing on a cinder block and peeking in one of the home’s windows.

In addition to being a policeman, Split Lip sells water purifiers on the side, though these are a scam. Early in the story, Split Lip is identified as (presumably) white and certainly racist toward blacks. Split Lip’s water purifier scheme is uncovered, and he can longer afford his daughter’s caregiver:

So before leaving for work [Split Lip] put Boneless on the floor with a water bottle and a picture book. Halfway through his shift he’d call home and she’d jerk the phone to the floor by the cord and make a certain sound that meant she was fine. In her simple way she understood poverty and never asked him to leave work, and time and again [Split Lip] came home to find her shivering in soiled pants (28).

The narrator gives background on the socioeconomic changes in the neighborhood, saying that the “panic-sell was in full bloom,” and that the narrator’s father, who worked at a stockyard, “was reduced to pushing a gutcart for minimum” (28). While the era is never explicitly named, it’s fair to deem the war that’s discussed later in the story as Vietnam, which would make this “panic-sell” be related to 1960s white flight, which saw whites leave racially-mixed urban regions in large numbers and head to the suburbs, with sizable amounts of urban industry also leaving. This, in turn, dropped real estate prices, which affects the narrator’s family: “Dad resolved to sell. But it was too late. The moment was past. A big loss was in the cards” (28). The narrator’s father refuses the price offered by the real estate agent. The narrator continues: “Then it was spring, and flowers bloomed in the park. Then it was summer, and the lagoon scummed over and race riots broke out and tear gas spread over the tress as Leo and I fished for carp” (29).

In June, Leo and the narrator, while fishing, watch Split Lip and another policeman bring a black teen into the clearing by the lagoon, along with the teen’s younger brother, Norris Crane, whom the narrator and Leo know. Norris is described as virtuous: “He played cornet with me in school, in Amazing Marching Falcons. He was an altar boy whose skin tore like paper” (29). Split drowns Norris’s older brother in the lagoon. Leo and the narrator flee without being seen. Split Lip tells Norris to stay quiet or Split Lip will beat his mother. The narrator’s dad tells the narrator to say nothing; his mother urges the narrator to pray. Norris becomes the “world’s youngest wino,” and “vow[s] in his high-pitched voice to waste Split Lip” (30). The narrator doesn’t believe him at first, but eventually, Norris shows the boys a gun, saying that he’s going to sneak in to Split Lip’s home and shoot him. Summer turns to autumn.

Leo and the narrator are walking home “in the odd autumnal dark” one night and pass by Split Lip’s house:

We mounted the cinder blocks. Inside, Split Lip was doing I’m a Little Teapot, making a handle of his left arm and a spout of his right. Boneless applauded by pounding her wrists together. Overcome with love, Split Lip gathered her up in his arms (30).

Norris Crane then steps out of the closet he’s been hiding in and points the gun at Split Lip, who asks, “Who will care for my child?” (31). This is followed by the sentence: “Norris paused, thinking, then blew his own brains out across the yellow wall” (31).

Leo and the narrator run “to the train tracks and lay on [their] backs, sick in [their] guts as the guiltless stars wheeled by” (31). Norris’s family “move[s] back to Mississippi,” while the narrator’s mom is later accosted walking home from a market. The narrator’s father says to “take one goddamned guess at the race of the guys who did this” (31). Leo, “sick with rage”(31), joins a neo-Nazi group. He later beats up a black male and is forced to enlist, in order to avoid a prison sentence. He encourages the narrator to enlist as well. However, the narrator’s dad “had pledged [the narrator] to Split Lip. They were old school pals. Since the shooting Boneless had been a mess. Unless someone was there all the time she wept nonstop. Dad said that someone was me” (32).

To this end, the narrator becomes Boneless’s caregiver, making her breakfast in the morning while “Split Lip went off to work, biting his lip in gratitude” (32). The narrator states:“I came to care about [Boneless]. She tried so hard. I read to her and taught her to type using a stick held between her teeth. I brushed her hair until it shone and made sure her smocks were clean” (32).

Split Lip dies in his sleep, and for Boneless, with her father dead, “the maw of the state home gaped” (32). The narrator’s father tries to convince the narrator’s Mom to house Boneless, but she says no, and Boneless is sent to the state home. The family visits Boneless on Thanksgiving, and Leo tells her about Split Lip being a murderer, which emotionally destroys her. Leo defends his action by saying:“The truth serves God” (33). Their father counters by saying:“God my foot, you buttinsky, you’ve broken her heart” (33). Boneless looks to the narrator for the truth, and he can’t lie to her:

Thus God was served: a sobbing girl in a wheelchair, photographs of a dead man [Split Lip] collected and burned, a typing stick used less often as the months went by, finally the cessation of all typing and a request that I visit no more (33).

Months go by while the narrator sits at home, “hearing gunshots and cackling addicts in the alley, waiting for any hopeful thing to sprout in [his] heart” (33). Finally, he goes to visit Boneless again. After seeing the people Boneless is surrounded by in the state home, the narrator declares that “enough is enough” and takes Boneless home to live with him:

By then I was selling the hell out of Buicks at night. So I got a little place of my own and moved her in with me. Now we’re pals. Family. It’s not perfect. Sometimes, it’s damn hard. But I look after her and she squeals with delight when I come home, and the sum total of sadness in the world is less than it would have been (33).

The concluding lines of the story are: “Her real name is Isabelle. A pretty, pretty name” (33).