Father
John nodded. 'That's right.'
I
smiled a little sarcastically. 'Wasn't on Death Row when he said that, was he?'
'I
appreciate your bitterness, Daniel.'
I
nodded. 'Thank you, Father.'
Father
John smiled understandingly. 'And your sarcasm.'
'You
think I'm not entitled to a little of both?'
'I
think you're entitled to a great deal more than you're getting, but there's
little I can do to change that. I'm here to talk to you, to listen, to try and
assist you to reconcile yourself to dying.'
'I've
been doing that for more than ten years, Father,' I said.
'And
to try and foster some sense of hope that there might be something better
afterwards.'
He
paused then and looked at me. I was unnerved in that moment, for the expression
in his face was one I had seen before. The expression of a man with a secret.
Was there something happening here he wasn't telling me?
'You
believe that?' I asked. 'That there might be something better after this?'
Father
John nodded. 'I do.'
I leaned
back and closed my eyes. I didn't feel like talking any more. I could see
colors behind my eyelids. I felt a little dizzy from the nicotine. There was a
bitter coppery taste in my mouth, not unpleasant, just unusual. I could sense
Father John was there opposite me, but I felt little requirement to humor him.
He was here for me, not the other way round.
'You
talk when you feel like talking, Daniel,' Father John said.
I
opened one eye fractionally and squinted at him. He seemed as relaxed and settled
as I.
'Don't
feel much like anything,' I said.
Father
John shrugged. 'Okay,' he said.
There
was silence for another minute or so.
'Figured
you might tell me a little about Nathan,' he eventually said.
I
opened my eyes and sat forward. 'Nathan?' I asked.
Father
John nodded. 'Nathan.'
'What
about Nathan?'
He
shrugged again. 'Anything you like.'
'Nathan
was like my brother,' I said.
'I
know.'
I
frowned. 'How do you know?'
'Because
when I mentioned his name you looked more like a human being than at any other
time.'
'Profound,'
I replied. 'What the hell is that s'posed to mean?'
'What
it says,' he replied. 'The tone in your voice is less bitter and cynical and
frustrated. We could be sat next to one another in a bar just shooting the
breeze.'
'Nathan
used to say that,' I said.
Father
John frowned. 'Used to say what?'
'That
expression -
shooting the breeze.'
He
nodded and smiled. 'So you want to tell me a little about him?'
I
didn't speak for a moment. I was tired. My head had started to ache. I don't
think I had talked so much in the last year.
'You
want to?' Father John reiterated.
'I
suppose… if you want.'
'I want,'
the priest said, and his expression was genuine and sincere.
And
so I did.
It
was like walking backwards and underwater at the same time.
I was
surprised at the clarity of my memory, the images I recalled as I spoke. There
were things I could remember in
crystal
detail, things I hadn't thought of for more than fifteen years.
And
those things came back, willingly almost, like they wanted to come back, like
they'd missed the attention, missed the sound of my voice, because they were
part of me just as much as they had been a part of Nathan.
And I
let them, not because I felt the need to tell John Rousseau, priest or
otherwise, but because it had been so long since I had spoken of Nathan Verney
I had started to forget how all of this had happened.
And
that I couldn't do, because if I forgot about Nathan I would also forget why
North Carolina was going to kill me.
And
dying for no reason was something I never wished to do.
1965
ended on a bad note.
Caroline
Lanafeuille had been gone four months. No-one spoke of her. No-one spoke of the
family. Seemed whatever her daddy had done was sufficient not only to
excommunicate them from Greenleaf, but also from our collective memory. That
had saddened me. I missed her, and in missing her I confronted the awful truth:
that I had done nothing to stop her leaving. I had failed to defend what I had
yearned for - yearned for for so long, and with such passion. And in some way I
also felt that I had been betrayed, that she had taken what existed of my
heart, had filled it with something so strong and seemingly permanent, and then
burst it in a single stroke. And when Christmas came and I sensed my mother
possessed neither the spirit nor the enthusiasm to celebrate the season I felt
truly alone. I did not pity myself, I did not crave sympathy, I merely wished
to be
with
people, and I was not.
Reverend
Verney took Nathan and the rest of the family to see relatives in Chicago at
the beginning of December. Nathan wanted to stay. He was nineteen and fiercely independent
but, regardless of his will and desire, the sense of religiously sanctioned
discipline so expertly administered by his father was the greater motivation.
He went. He had no choice. I remember standing at the edge of the Lake the day
before he was due to leave, how he shook my hand, and then hugged me, his broad
hands on my shoulders, his grinning face right there before me, and how he told
me
hang loose… take it easy.
He'd be gone for a month, back in the first
week of January, and I should spend the time finding myself a girl.
'So
should you,' I said, feeling a small sense of reassurance and self-satisfaction
in knowing that Nathan was utterly unaware of what had taken place between
Caroline Lanafeuille and myself the August before.
'Let
me take care o' my own business,' Nathan said, and there was something in his
expression, something in his tone, that made it clear as daylight. He had. He
really had.
'Who?'
I asked, my voice pitching a good three tones above normal.
'Hold
it down,' Nathan said, and started laughing.
'So
who? Who for Christ's sake?'
He
shook his head and smiled. 'No way Mister Motor- mouth.'
'That
girl who does the flowers at the church… whassername, Melody
something-or-other?' I persisted.
Nathan
shook his head. 'Not saying. No clues. A promise is a promise.'
'Hey,'
I said. 'No deal.'
Nathan
shook his head again. 'Hell, man, I tell you, you go tell someone else who
tells half the world, and then my father finds out he'll stripe my back for a
week.'
'I
won't say,' I said, my expression suddenly solemn.
Nathan
shook his head. 'No,' he repeated. 'I said I wouldn't say a thing to anyone, so
that's the way it's gonna be.'
There
it was, that conviction, that stubborn dig-your- heels-in resilience that I had
seen before. There would be no moving him. Later, much later, I thought that at
any other time I would have pursued him, insisted. I think the real reason I
let it go was because I had a secret of my own. A secret called Caroline whom I
had loved, and watched… no, whom I had
let
disappear.
Nathan
changed the subject. He told me the reason they were going to Chicago was to
see his ma's sister. She had three boys, all around Nathan's age. Two of them
had already been killed in Vietnam. They were going out there to help her, to
counsel her in her loss. The third son, no more than eighteen, was in a field
hospital somewhere. That was all they knew, nothing more nor less. He was just
somewhere.
The Army said they would find him,
promised
they would find him, but
they'd been saying that for nigh on a month. Nathan believed he was dead as
well.
They
wanted to get out to Chicago before his mother found out.
In
that light I wanted him to go. I grieved for his cousins, people I neither
knew, nor would ever know. I did not know their names, could not recall their
faces from some summer picnic we had shared in Myrtle Beach, nor from playing
tag with them along the edge of the County Fair grounds, nor from swimming in
Lake Marion at the height of a Greenleaf summer when the sun scorched your back
and made the rocks too hot to stand on. But I
felt
I knew them. Just
like I knew those boys who became men in an Army tent back in November.
I
felt I knew them all.
I
watched him go when he left. He walked the long way round and took the path
that ran out towards the black quarter of Greenleaf.
I
watched him grow smaller and smaller, vanishing into the distance like a
memory, and when he'd finally disappeared I stood there and looked out over the
cool surface of the water.
The
Lake was silent. A gray mist hung along the opposite bank and obscured the
land. The way the Lake looked it could have been the sea. Swim out there, keep
on going, and at some unknown point you'd just fall off the edge of the world.
I
remembered the day I met Nathan. The baked ham sandwich. The little kid with
jug-handle ears, traffic-light eyes and a mouth that ran from ear to ear with
no rest in between.
I did
not long for those days to return, but I missed the sense of levity. Seemed to
me that growing up was a matter of taking everything more seriously, and I had
never found that easy.
I
walked home then. I lay on the bed where I had fallen completely in love with
Caroline Lanafeuille, and I thought about what I would do when the Army sent
for me.
A
week after Nathan's departure I went to see Eve Chantry.
Why I
went I cannot remember now. Perhaps I fabricated some reason, some purpose to
visit, but the true motivation was to remedy my lack of company.
It
was the first day of snow. I saw a deer on the way down. It stood in a grove of
trees near the bend in Nine Mile Road, and it just watched me. It did not run.
It stood stock-still, watched me as I walked, and unnerved me. I even clapped
my hands, hollered once or twice, but that deer stood immobile, didn't even
blink.
For
some reason that brief and unimportant incident made me feel insignificant.
When I
arrived at Mrs. Chantry's house there were lightbulbs strung from one side of
the verandah to the next. I went up the steps, opened the screen door and
knocked.
I
waited patiently, I knew she'd walk slowly, and after three or four minutes I
knocked again.
I
heard a sound above me. I went back through the screen door and started down
the steps to the path.
The
snow came down like a blanket.
I
remember looking up and the sky appeared to be falling towards me.
Suddenly
I was on the floor. Snow was in my eyes, my ears, in my mouth even.
And
then I heard her laughing.
I
finally surfaced and stood up, and there above me, leaning from a window in the
front of the house, was Eve Chantry. She had opened a window to see who had
come a- calling, and the narrow roof that overhung the porch had let its
covering of snow fall.
I had
walked backwards down the front steps to meet it. My timing had been
immaculate. And then I started laughing too.
It
was a strange sight, almost as if I could see myself from a distance, almost as
if I stood at the bend in the road that led down to the Chantry house, and
there I was, standing no more than three or four feet from the porch steps.
Like a ghost.