St. Patrick's Bed (Ashland, 3)

Terence M. Green

For Daniel Casci Green,  
the completion of my fabulous Trilogy

Acknowledgments

If you're lucky, people surround you when you're writing a book, even when they don't know they're surrounding you. Their goodwill, suggestions, patience, advice, anticipation, and outright help all nourish, in ways sometimes too mysterious to articulate. So I have been lucky.

This novel was written with the support of the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council. For their faith and approval and welcome assistance, I am indeed grateful.

My cousins, Jacqueline McCarthy, Jo-Anne and Bob Reid of Madoc, Ontario, did more than their share with warmth and enthusiasm. Rick Conley of Ashland, Kentucky, generously provided me with valuable local information. Gayla Collins of Sheridan, Wyoming, helped me appreciate anew the mysteries of Ashland. In Dayton, Ohio, Dr. Bill Erwin and his wife, Patty, offered a hospitality and largesse second to none, making their city and environs come alive for me. To them I owe a special debt of gratitude.

I want to thank Jim (J. Madison) Davis and his wife, Melissa, Phyllis Gotlieb, Andrew Weiner, Rob Sawyer, Ken and Judy Luginbühl, Ian Lancashire, Tom Potter, Chester Kamski, and Bill and Judy Kaschuk; the good people at

H. B. Fenn: Harold Fenn and his wife, Sylvia, Rob Howard, Melissa Cameron, Heidi Winter, and Kari Atwell; and the terrific folks at Forge Books: Tom Doherty, Linda Quinton, Jennifer Marcus, Jim Minz, and Moshe Feder.

Once again, sincere thanks to my agent, Shawna McCarthy, and double thanks to my insightful editor, David Hartwell.

As always, my sons, Conor and Owen, and my wife, Merle, all surround me with love and support in ways both wonderful and mysterious, letting the writing integrate smoothly into the rich fabric of family.

And then there's Daniel, our new arrival, the ultimate blessing for the new millennium. You don't know how long we've been waiting for you. You helped too. More than you can know.

Talk about luck.

PART ONE

Dayton, Ohio

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown.... A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole.

—CARL JUNG
 

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

ONE

I

People keep dying. You'd think I'd be a pessimist, or depressed, or something, but I'm not. I love life. I love being alive. It keeps getting better all the time.
 

Even though people keep dying.

My father died on April 15, 1995. He was ninety years old. It was his second bout with pneumonia in six months, and this one did him in.

Up until October of '94 he'd done okay. Almost ninety and never had surgery. Two strokes though. The first was back in 1969, just before his sixty-fifth birthday—just shy of retirement. My mother had said that he worried and fretted about money and retirement so much that he'd given himself a stroke, but he recovered pretty nicely. The second was in 1992, age eighty-seven, which took a lot of the remaining wind out of his sails.

Someone dies at age ninety, after a pretty good life, you don't know whether to cry or say Thank God. I did both.

He was in Toronto General. The hospital phoned me about eleven o'clock at night, then I phoned my brother and sisters, but because I live closest, I was the first one there.

"Don't take anything out of the room," the nurse said. "Everything has to be accounted for."

I looked at her. "He hasn't got anything."

She put her hands in her pockets, glanced down, left.

But I did slip the red garnet off his finger and put it on my own right hand. It's ten-karat gold, soft and beaten, not worth anything. The stone is squashed down in the setting, lopsided at one end. Later, when he got there, I told my brother, Dennis, what I'd done, wanting his permission, and he understood.

When the nurse came back into the room, she opened the drawer in the bedside table. Inside were his glasses, dentures, and electric razor. That goddamned razor. He loved it. Those last years when he lived with us, he seemed to spend half the time with it spread out in pieces on his night table, screwdriver in hand, glasses pushed up on his forehead, servicing its idiosyncrasies. Then he'd run it around his face and neck long after there was any chance of a whisker hanging on, caressing himself.

His mouth was open, eyes shut. "I'd like the dentures put back in," I said.

She nodded.

And there he was. There it was. The end. Just like that. I couldn't believe it. The rocks and sands of my life had shifted beneath my feet.

I looked down at him. Where are you? I thought. I don't understand. What happened?

I put his glasses and razor in my pocket. I never knew what to do with them, so I still have them.

We put nearly all his clothes in green garbage bags and gave them to Goodwill. Kept his neckties, though. They were kind of interesting. He had a penchant for wine-colored and navy-blue, with white polka dots. One said "Pure Silk, Foulard, Imported by Forsyth" on the label. They were a little wider than the ones that I wore. But you never know. I might wear them. I might.

I still have his tackle box too. I don't know what to do with it either. It's steel gray, covered with rust spots. There's a yellow sticker on the front, just above the latch, that says "Truline—Seamless—Eaton's of Canada." When you lift the lid it unfolds into three trays, and an odor steals out that takes me back to childhood in a wooden rowboat, then disappears.

Inside is my father.

The hula popper, with the rubber grass skirt rotted away. Then the rest of the names crystallize: flatfish, crazy crawler, jitterbug, Mepps spinners. There's a trailer chain for keeping fish in the water after a catch, boxes of hooks, razor blades, a hundred yards of eight-pound test line, leaders, sinkers, a pair of pliers, a Langley Fisherman's De-Liar scale. And then there's the wooden, handmade hand-painted lure, about four inches long, that we never saw him use. We'd ask him about it, my brother and I. He'd only smile and tell us that it was for muskie. He never fished for muskie.

This is my legacy.

II

Life keeps surprising me.

I didn't see it coming. I hardly see anything coming. That night of my father's funeral, when Adam asked about his own father, I was floored. A bolt out of the blue. He'd never asked before. Never mentioned him. Nothing.

In hindsight, I don't know why I was so surprised. Now that I think of it, if he was ever going to ask about his father, that would have been the logical time. But I didn't think of it then.

Hindsight. Like they say. Twenty-twenty.

He asked it simply. "Is my father alive?"

Jeanne and I both stopped chewing.

Adam waited. He's twenty-one now, majoring in English at the University of Toronto, going into third year. He is my stepson. He was ten years old when I met him that summer in Ashland, Kentucky, twelve when we settled here in Toronto, fourteen when Jeanne and I finally married, and I'd always thought that I was the only father in his head.

Like I said, it blindsided me.

And Jeanne. His mother was so taken aback she was speechless for a good thirty seconds.

I watched her, then Adam, waited.

Finally, she nodded. "I think he is. I don't know for sure, but I think he is." Her eyes darted to me, then settled on Adam. They stared at each other in silence.

Then Adam began eating again, patient, calm. We followed his lead. After a minute or so, though, he asked his next question: "Where is he?"