The Essay A Novel (30 page)

“That's no biggie. We put your college money back, and then split what's left. I'll use my portion to get a trailer or as a down payment for a little place. People are moving out of Vinton County in droves looking for work. I ought to be able to pick up a place pretty reasonable. Mr. Morgan said he would talk to the bank and get me the loan. We'll put your half in the bank and you can have it when you're out of college.”

I shook my head. “No, that's not fair. This place isn't worth that much, and I'd be getting too much of the money and . . .”

“This isn't a debate,” he said, cutting me off. “I don't want you to have any reason not to finish college. I've got a good job. It'll work out fine.”

“Did you think about the old man? It's going to be bad enough when he comes back and finds out he's divorced and Mom gave us the house. What happens when he comes back and finds someone else living here?”

Edgel continued to paint until he finished a corner piece of the window frame. After resting his brush across the can of paint, Edgel looked at me as if I were a complete puzzle, the last clue in a crossword that just would not come to mind. He looked away, his knuckles digging into his hips, and after a minute walked into the house without a word.

When he returned a minute later, he sat down on the top step of the porch and with an index finger motioned for me to sit next to him. Something was clasped in his fisted right hand. After I sat down, Edgel extended his right arm until I put an open hand under his. He loosened his fingers and a scorched, oval piece of steel dropped into my hands. It was black and brown, and parts of the burned metal had a rainbow sheen, like oil spread across the water. It was a watch, and its glass crystal had melted into its face, blurring the numbers. In spite of the damage, it was immediately recognizable to me. It was the remains of my dad's Twist-O-Flex wristwatch. I rolled it around in my hands for several seconds, examining the gnarled lump, unable to grasp its significance. “Where did you get it?”

“I found it under a couple tons of wet ash in the subbasement of the sawmill.”

I thought about his words for a moment. “What was it doing down there?”

“Lying next to what was left of the old man.”

It was a ridiculously obvious question, but still I asked, “Dad's dead?”

“Extremely.”

“He burned up in that fire? What in God's name was he doing down there?”

Edgel scratched the back of his neck and squinted past me to the western hills.

‘“What was he doing down there?'” Edgel said, repeating my question in a mocking tone. “If you can't figure that one out, maybe you're not college material, after all. The reason he never hooked up with Virgil was because he never left Vinton County. That whole tirade about heading to Florida was just a cover. I suspect he ducked into the woods for a couple of days, then broke into the sawmill to set it on fire to get back at Mr. Morgan.” He looked at me until our eyes met and he had my full attention. “Jimmy Lee, our dad liked fire. He always liked fire.”

“Always?”

Edgel nodded once. “Always. He thought that was the best way to get revenge.”

“Or cover up a crime?”

“Or that.”

“Like burglarizing a house?”

Edgel nodded again, the corners of his mouth curling in a sad grin. “Yeah, like burglarizing a house.”

“It wasn't you that burglarized and torched those houses?”

“Nope.”

“Not once?”

“Not ever.” He rested his elbows on his knees and looked away, appearing to blink away tears. “He was hitting the homes of widows and divorced women, mostly. He figured out when they worked, or when they were at church, and hit 'em then. He didn't always burn them, but he would if he thought he needed to cover his tracks or if he wanted to get even for something. Mrs. Zurhorst, that old widow who lived down by the railroad tunnel, he robbed her place and burned it to the ground because her son gave Dad a beating down at the Double Eagle Bar one night. Ain't that something? He gets drunk and gets his ass beat, and he burns down some old lady's house to get even. That poor old woman lost everything and I don't think she lived another month after that.”

“But how did you get blamed for them?”

“Dad bought that Rocket 88 off Rocky Johnson. The transmission was going bad and he threw a rod, and you knew Dad, he wouldn't spend ten minutes to fix something. He just dumped it out on the hillside with the rest of his junkers. I asked him if I could have it and he started laughing. ‘If you can get it running, you can have it,' he told me. ‘You won't get that thing running in a hundred years.' It took me all of two days and I had that thing purring like a kitten. Once I got the Rocket running, the old man couldn't stand it. He said it was still his car, and he started taking it out on his bar runs and using it when he was burglarizing houses. Some people had seen the Rocket parked near some of the houses that got hit, so the cops figured it was me. I was drunk one night and put the car in a ditch. The sheriff went through my car and found road flares, Sterno, and some jewelry from one of the burglaries.” He held out his hands, palms up. “Game over.”

“Dad never told them it was him?”

“Come on, little brother, you're not that naïve. Of course he didn't. He and Mom came down to see me in jail one night and told me that if he came forward that both of us would end up in prison. That was it. Sorry, pal. Keep your mouth shut, do your time, and we'll see you later.”

I looked down at the slab of steel, shook my head and asked, “What kind of man does that to his son?”

“Nick Hickam, that's who.”

“So, Mom knew you didn't do it, too?”

Edgel nodded.

I looked out over the property and watched as the sun seemed to balance itself atop Buckingham Ridge to the west. “What did you do with his body?”

“Remember that night you surprised me at the mill?”

“Sure.”

“He was in the back of the truck, mixed in with the ashes. There wasn't much left; a skull and crumbled pieces of bone. What I found fit in the bottom of the wheelbarrow.”

“What do you think happened?”

“The inspectors found the propane tanks upstairs had been opened. Mr. Morgan told us that the day we went down there. Propane is heavier than air and it sank into the subbasement. My bet is he opened those tanks figuring once he got the fire started down below that it would fuel the flames. But when he tried to fire it up, probably with one of those road flares, he was standing in a compartment up to his ass in propane. Like I said, there wasn't much left to bury. He blew himself to pieces.”

I continued to stare out over the barren hillside, trying to digest everything that Edgel had just told me. “You lost nine years of your life because of him,” I said. “Nine years, Edgel. Did he even say he was sorry?”

Edgel snorted out a laugh. “Dad? Say he was sorry? Come on, Jimmy Lee, what do you think? He never said he was sorry 'bout anything. He never said he'd make it up to me. After I went to prison, he ran the Rocket until it conked out again. The only thing he did for me was put it up on blocks in the shed and leave it alone.”

The thought of Edgel sitting in prison for nine years, being portrayed as inherently evil and a pariah by my father, sickened me. The sadness that I had felt when I realized my father was dead evaporated. Rather, I felt only anger and disgust for him and sadness for my brother, whom I had learned to love and respect. I also felt relief in knowing that I would never again stare into my father's sneering face and that justice—divine intervention, perhaps?—had been served. I fervently hoped that, even for just a fleeting second before he died, in the instant after he lit the flare, that Nick Hickam understood the magnitude of his own stupidity.

“Did you tell Mom?”

Edgel shook his head. “Nope.”

“Are you going to?”

“I might tell her someday.”

“She might be relieved to know that he'll never be around to bother her.”

“Nick Hickam is the last thing on her mind, Jimmy Lee. She's divorced, remarried, happy, and got no reason to come back here. The fewer people who know, the better.”

“Why don't you tell the sheriff?”

“Where would that get us?”

“It would eliminate any suspicion he might have that you did it.”

“All it would do is put another black mark beside the name Hickam. No, Jimmy Lee, let's just let it rest. The old man's dead; Mr. Morgan got himself a new sawmill; I've got a good job; you're going to college. That's good enough for me.”

He took the Twist-O-Flex out of my hands and pushed it back in his pocket.

“What are you going to do with the watch?”

Edgel pulled the blistered metal back out of his pocket and stared at it. “You want it?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“Let's take a walk.”

Edgel and I walked up the hillside past the spot where authorities had tackled and arrested our grandfather and cut through the wooded ridgeline to the ponds—old pits left behind by strip mining operations. Rumors had floated around Vinton County for years that the Youngstown and Steubenville mob used the ponds as a repository for bodies because the acidic waters supposedly ate away everything but a corpse's teeth. I doubt the stories were true, but they made for great local legend. At the edge of the first pond, Edgel bounced the twisted metal in his palm a few times, and then pitched it far into the middle of the water. We stood in silence for a few minutes, watching as the ripples moved away from the point of entry and dissipated long before they made shore.

“Goodbye, Nick Hickam,” I said.

“Good riddance,” Edgel said.

As we walked back to the house, I recalled an incident at the dinner table at least ten years earlier. “Edgel, I remember that night you gave mom that necklace that had been stolen from Mrs. Radebaugh, that woman who worked up at the truck stop. Do you remember that?”

Edgel smiled with just the corners of his mouth. “Oh yeah, I remember that.” He looked at me and said, as though reading my mind, “So, if I didn't do the burglaries, how did I get the necklace?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was pissed at the old man because he kept using the Rocket to pull the burglaries. I told him to quit doing it in my car and he told me to kiss his ass. ‘It's not your car,' he said. He gave me a backhand upside of my head and said no snot-nosed kid was going to tell him how to live his life. A couple of days later, he gets into the trunk of the Rocket, digs around under the spare tire and pulls out that necklace. He gives it to me and tells me to take it up to Columbus and pawn it. I said okay, then that night I gave it to Mom just to piss him off. I knew it would make him madder than hell.”

“You and Dad got into a fistfight out in the yard after dinner.”

“You thought he was giving me a beating because I stole the necklace from Mrs. Radebaugh, didn't you?”

“Of course.”

“Stealin' didn't bother Dad, little brother . . . Unless, of course, you were stealin' from him.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I

got up at 5
AM
. The smell of coffee and bacon already filled the house on Red Dog Road. After pissing away my morning erection, I pulled on a T-shirt and staggered to the kitchen. Edgel was dressed, shaved, and looking sharp in a pair of khaki slacks, a blue Ohio Methodist University golf shirt, and one of my white busboy aprons from the truck stop. “You look good in that apron,” I said, pulling out a chair. “What time did you get up?”

“It's a big day,” he said. “You've got to get up and get rolling.” He slid a plate of bacon, three fried eggs, and white toast across the table. “Eat up. We need to be on the road by six thirty, at the latest.”

“You know I've got to run over . . .”

“I know. That's why you've got to eat and get your ass moving.”

It was the last Sunday of August 1974, the day that I was to report to summer football camp at Ohio Methodist University. Edgel was taking me to camp and could not have been more excited or more nervous. All summer he had monitored my workouts and asked on numerous occasions, “Do you think you'll get to play as a freshman?” Each time he asked, I would point to a flexed bicep and nod. This always made him smile and he would yell, “Yeah, baby.” Edgel wanted a part in my success and I was happy to share it with him. We were now the only family each of us had. Virgil had called back the week after Edgel had shown me Dad's watch and demanded that we file a police report. Edgel talked to him and said he didn't care where the old man was and if Virgil was so damn concerned, he could call the sheriff and report him missing. “You want to call? I'll give you the phone number.” Virgil called Edgel a selfish prick and was spewing other vulgarities when Edgel hung up the phone. We had not heard from him since. Mom called occasionally, but had not been back in the area since the day she had divorced, remarried, and deeded us the house on Red Dog Road. When Edgel had finished painting the house, he had the Farnsworth boys haul away the rusting junkers that lined the drive and the improvement to the property was impressive. In late May, after the property was cleaned up, he put a “House for Sale” sign along County Road 12, with an arrow pointing up Red Dog Road. A second sign was staked at the bottom of our drive.

After breakfast, I showered and headed down the stairs. The keys to the Rocket 88 were on the brass hook by the back door. I snatched them on my way out. The rusty spring had yet to pull the screen door back against the jamb when Edgel yelled, “You be back here by six thirty. I don't want to be late.”

“I'll be back in plenty of time.”

Amanda Singletary lived about four miles from my house. I wanted to see her before I left for college. So, at a few minutes after six on this Sunday morning, I rapped three times on her aluminum storm door. Within a few seconds, I could hear someone stirring inside. The door cracked open and Miss Singletary squinted into the morning sun. “Jimmy Lee,” she said, clutching a pink, quilted robe closed with one hand and pushing open the aluminum storm door with the other.