Shame (23 page)

It was his life.

I had to try harder to reach him.

“But how?” I asked Michelle that night after we'd gotten my folks stowed in B. W.'s room, and gotten him set up on the couch (he'd refused to stay the night in Michael's room, which more and more looked like it was going to be preserved as some sort of museum kept in loving memory of our poor lost boy, drawers forever full of dingy white socks and frayed Jockey briefs, walls forever plastered with posters of Aerosmith, Van Halen, Nirvana, Iron Maiden, dresser covered with the toiletries that he'd left behind, mostly unopened bottles of Brut from Michelle's parents every Christmas and a half-full bottle of Drakkar Noir, the cologne he'd decided he liked when Mindy Stallings told him she liked it on him and had stopped liking when he stopped liking Mindy Stallings).

“Well,” Michelle said, pulling on one of her warm socks, “you just have to be persistent. Don't give up.”

“I am persistent. I've always been persistent. What good does it do? He won't talk to me.” I raised my hands palm up in front of me. “No one will talk to me. Phillip doesn't have a phone. Michael does, but he won't answer it. And I'm not much good on the phone anyway. I can't imagine what the other person is doing. If they're paying attention to me or watching the Cowboys or making faces about how much they hate talking to me.”

“Oh, I'm sure they'd be doing that.” Michelle pulled on her other fluffy sock.

“Well, anyway, my point is that it doesn't matter how persistent I am if I can't even talk to anyone.”

“Write a letter,” she said, now properly clad. She flexed her red-toed feet, purred in satisfaction.

“Write a letter,” I repeated.

“You know. Paper. Envelope. Stamp.”

“I'm familiar with the concept,” I said. “I just hadn't thought about it. It seems so—remote. You write letters to people—”

“—you don't see everyday.” She nodded and took my hand in hers. “So. Write a letter.”

I sighed. “All right,” I said.

She rose, rolled her shoulders. “I've got to go to sleep. I'm tired out from talking with your folks. They can never seem to remember that I already love Jesus.”

She climbed in between the sheets. I pulled the comforter over her, arranged it around her ears, and sat down at her side after she had snuggled into the mattress and found a comfortable spot.

“They're old,” I said.

“Hmm?”

“My parents. They're old.”

“They sure are,” she said.

“It scares me.”

She turned her head toward me and opened her eyes. “Scares you? Why?”

I shook my head. It seemed like another thing, on top of all the others. Why even talk about it?

“J. J.?”

I shook my head again, but with resignation; it was bedtime, so I had to speak the truth. “I'm afraid that they're going to die, Shell. I mean, now I know they're going to. And I don't know what I'm going to do when that happens.”

She sat up and gathered me into her arms, pulled my head down onto her breast, stroked my hair. “I'll be right here,” she said. “You know that. I'll always be right here—if you want me to be.”

“I know,” I said. Did everything have to come out into the open this baldly, this late at night, when truth telling was the law? How had we stumbled into this particular darkened corridor?

She squeezed my hand. “What else do you know?”

I shook my head and sighed. As long as we were telling the truth, there was something else. “Why on earth did you invite Samantha here for Thanksgiving? You've never liked her.”

“Of course I've never liked her,” she said. “Why should I? Do you like Bill?”

“I loathe him,” I said. “I'd like to see him trampled by cattle. You haven't answered my question.”

“Do you really want to know?” She fluffed her pillow, preparing, perhaps, for my saying no.

“I do.” I did not say, “Tell the truth,” for that would have been superfluous. I simply anticipated the blow, felt my stomach contract in preparation.

“Because,” she said after a long pause in which I knew she'd been trying to think of the gentlest way to say what she had to say, “twenty years is plenty long enough for a man to mope after what might have been. It's time to make yourself understand that. Time to be here with us instead of somewhere else. Because part of you has always been somewhere else, no matter how I tugged and snatched and fought. With Samantha, or at least somewhere off down a road you didn't take.”

“Don't cry,” I said, for she was crying and smacking her pillow with her fist now instead of fluffing it.

“I think I've earned a cry or two, John Tilden,” she said. “Don't tell me not to cry,” but she did quit smacking her pillow and rested her head on it, and I held her hand and stroked her head, and shortly afterward, she was asleep.

“Amazing,” I said, and shook my head. The sleep of the righteous.

I wandered down the hallway and back to the study to check on my writing supplies, maybe write a letter or two.

I was up late, but Dad wanted to go out early and look over the farm he had known so well, so after I'd fed and watered the calves and we'd had a good breakfast of egg substitute, turkey sausage, and real coffee, hot and black as night, we climbed into the truck. As we pulled around the house, Frank jumped in back and up onto the wheel well, his head hanging over the sidewall of the bed, his tongue lolling. We drove down our long driveway, an eighth of a mile to the road, then on around the section line to the Old Place.

I stopped at the gap, opened it, drove the truck through, closed it behind us before driving on. Normally the passenger gets out to open the gate, but for the first time, Dad didn't clamber out without speaking. He didn't offer, and I didn't ask.

We bounced down through the pasture, toward the old barn, Dad holding onto the armrest with white-knuckle force.

“Take a right,” Dad said when we reached a pasture intersection—a place where two pickup tracks intersected, although the path we turned onto was much less used and had all but disappeared. It went to the foundation of the old house, the place where Dad's parents first lived when they got married and where Dad himself lived until he and Mom got married and built the place where we now lived. There was nothing left of the old house but the concrete foundation, atop a low rise and surrounded by dark green cedar trees, although once there were no trees here and you could have seen all the way down the valley to Whirlwind Creek.

After my grandparents died but long before I was born, Dad tore the house down and used the boards to add on to the barn at the Home Place. That's all there was to that house, boards. No plumbing, no wiring. He often told moral character-building stories to me when I was a kid about how he grew up toting buckets of water from the cistern down back of the house, about cold baths with rough lye soap stinging his skin, about lonely late-night trips to the outhouse in pitch darkness.

Now the foundation of the old house was almost hidden by the cedars clustered close by, and I resolved to cut down more than a few of them for firewood next winter.

I pulled up as close to the foundation as I could, and we climbed out.

“You know, John, memory is a funny thing,” my dad said after walking up the concrete steps and onto the floor of what would have been the front bedroom. “I always thought this place was bigger.”

“I've always thought of it as really small,” I admitted, stepping past him to what must have been the kitchen. “I always wondered how you did it.”

“It was a hard life.” He looked around, pointing at this corner and that as if placing furniture. “But we were happy.”

What did he see when he came up here among the aromatic cedars?

I didn't know. He'd shown me pictures, told me his stories, but there were other things on my mind, impediments in the way of my understanding. “Dad?” I asked finally.

“Uhm,” he said, still seeing what had been.

“Have you had a good life?”

It stirred him out of his reverie. He looked at me owlishly, his head tilted to the side as if to better regard this improbable question. “Of course I have,” he said at last. His tone indicated that there was no doubt in his mind.

Maybe there wasn't.

“Is there anything you regret?”

He knelt to pick up a petrified bit of branch on the floor and turned away from me. “Of course there is.”

I stepped across the space between us, space that suddenly seemed to have dwindled. “You've had regrets?”

“Of course I have.” Again the owl look. “What person with a thinking brain in his head goes through life without regret?” He shook his head. I would have given anything to know what he was thinking. “Things don't always happen the way we want them to. Whenever you step through a crossroads, you leave three paths behind.”

I stooped down next to him to pick up my own twig from the foundation, turned it this way and that in my hands. “You never told me any of this,” I said. “Why didn't we ever talk like this before?”

He rose to his feet to regard me. “Son, what earthly good would it have done?”

I stood up. “It would have made a difference to me,” I said, a little more forcefully than I wanted. I shook the twig once or twice before I let it drop. “It would have made a difference.”

He turned his head to the side and regarded me with bright eyes. “You talk to your own young ones about your fears and sorrows?”

“No,” I admitted. “I want to protect them as long as I can from all the heartbreak out there.”

“No different for me,” he said gruffly and turned to toss his twig off into the cedar forest. “Anyway, your mother says there's a reason for everything that happens. Providence in the fall of a sparrow, she says.”

“Do you believe that?”

He fixed me with his gaze. “Don't you?”

“I'm trying to,” I said.

“No different for me,” he said, and he turned away. “Take me on around the section line.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and I watched his slowly departing back for a moment with a warm glow of love lighting my chest that I hadn't felt for a long time, if indeed I had ever felt it for him in that way.

Then I scurried on to catch up to him so he wouldn't turn and scowl at me for making him wait.

“Your trouble,” he told me between bounces, as we drove back uphill across the pasture, “is you think too much.”

“I've been told that,” I said. “I wish that were my only trouble.”

“You've done well for yourself,” he went on. “Raised good kids. Honored your parents. Found a useful place for yourself. Provided for your family. Done just fine.”

“I could dispute most of that,” I said, bouncing so high off the seat that I almost banged the ceiling. “But the most important thing, it seems to me, is that even if I've done everything you say, I didn't always want to. Mostly didn't want to.”

He smiled. “Got done all the same, though, didn't it?”

“The Lord loves a cheerful giver,” I quoted. We pulled up to the gap.

“The Lord loves everyone,” Dad said, and folded his hands into his lap.

End of story.

And it was; the rest of the morning we talked about cattle, about a part I couldn't buy for the combine and would probably have to weld up myself, about the price of wheat. The moment, whatever it was, wherever it came from, was gone, but I would always treasure the memory. It was the longest and most genuine talk we had ever had, and on the way home, I stole an occasional glance at my father, who now seemed like an altogether different person from the man I had set out with earlier that morning, the man I had loved and feared for forty years.

We were raised up together; we grew apart.

But maybe, toward the end of his life, we grew back together again.

At least, it gave me comfort to think so.

December 23, 1994

Phillip One Horse
RR 1, Box 127
Watonga, OK 73047

Dear Phillip,

I hope you'll know that all of what follows—all of it, good and bad—is written with the greatest affection and respect for you. I also hope you'll think of me as a good enough friend that I should tell you how I feel. So here goes:

When I think of all the people I've known and all the lives I've come in contact with on this earth, it is you and yours that frustrates me most. You're one of the kindest, warmest, and most intelligent people I've ever met, but something in you seems to want to pull the past along behind you like a trailer, to make it pop up like a peacock's tail when most everybody else is ready and willing to forget about it and accept you for the wonderful person you are.

Now maybe you're thinking I've got no call to talk about the past, and maybe you're right to think so, because I am still wrestling the past like a man in a gator pit, but it's also true that sometimes we can help people—or at least give unasked-for advice—about the very problems that paralyze us. So take these words, for whatever good they might do: I am proud to be your friend, and I don't care about anything that might have happened in the past. I understand that you're distressed about your behavior at Thanksgiving. Please don't be. It's forgotten. Scout's honor.

Please know that my family and I worry about you, that we miss you, that we care what happens to you, even if you don't.

That's all I wanted to say, I guess. I won't ask you to come to the reunion or to come play basketball with us, although few things would give me more pleasure than to see you meet the past on even terms. I won't even ask you to let us know that you're okay, although it would clear some worries from my table, which is currently packed to the breaking point with apprehension.

Just know that our Christmas wish for you is peace, and that if I can ever be of help to you in anything in this life, you have only to ask.

Your friend,
John