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.