The Summer Son

by Lancaster, Craig

  I HELD VIGIL AT DAD’S bedside for three days after Kelly called and summoned me to Montana. My newfound aunt and I alternated shifts of sleeping and sitting. I read a lot of books. I watched a lot of TV. I played the satellite radio I had bought for Dad and ensured that he was as comfortable as he could be.

  I grew to love Kelly in those days spent with her, to love her as if she had always been in my life. Her own life, full and robust, was on hold while she tended to Dad in his last days. She called it a gift. I saw it that way too.

  Dad’s lucid moments were few, but each time he opened his eyes, he looked into a face of love. There was little we could give him, but we could do that.

  In the quietest moments, late at night, I watched the snow fall outside his bedroom window. I held fast to the fresh memories we had made. I remembered Avery and Adia, initially so distrusting of him when we came to Billings a few weeks earlier, finally warming up to this plodding grandpa who played hide-and-seek and showed them how to do magic tricks. On our last night in Billings, they sat on his lap and snuggled into his chest as he read them a bedtime story. They would never forget him, I was sure. I needed it to be true. They had a chance to know only the good.

  In my darker moments, usually in the wee hours as I silently fought my stubbornly open eyes, I wondered if I might someday be able to be so fortunate. My gratitude for these last days with Dad knew no bounds, but even so, I could still feel my heart’s hard soil passing through my fingers.

  On Sunday afternoon, while Kelly slept, I sat next to Dad’s bed, reading a Louis L’Amour Western from his bookshelf. I lost myself in the pages, which amazed me. I had held L’Amour in such disdain without ever having read him. Pity my closed mind.

  “Mitch.”

  Startled, I dropped the book. Dad looked up at me, his blue eyes clear as a July day.

  “Do you need anything, Dad?”

  His voice was weak, but his words were sure-footed. “Mitch, we need to talk.”

  “OK.”

  “I want you to take me to three places.”

  Before the cancer had started its final march, we had talked about cremation. I was ready.

  “OK.”

  “Havre, where I was made.”

  “OK.”

  “Split Rail, at the ranch.”

  “Whatever you want, Dad.”

  “And Milford.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood rapt.

  “Milford?”

  Dad smiled.

  “That’s where it went on sideways on us, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. I felt as though I were choking.

  “You find Toby Swint. He’ll show you.”

  “Toby? What?”

  “I did the best I could, Mitch,” Dad whispered.

  Sleep overtook him again, and I listened to his deep, labored breathing as I tried to pick up the pieces of what he had dropped on me.

  Milford?

  Toby Swint?

  Just after five that afternoon, Dad’s breathing became shallow and then, finally, stopped. I stroked his forehead.

  “You old goat.” Tears spilled from my eyes.

  On Dad’s face, a smile turned up at the corners of his mouth.

  We cremated Dad, and I invited his buddies to come over to lift toasts. Charley Rayburn, Pete Rafferty, Ben Yoder, and maybe a dozen other coots I didn’t know showed up and told stories about him into the wee hours. Kelly and I laughed along, and we shed tears for the side of the man that we had rarely seen. There is no universal standard for judging a man; it’s all a matter of degrees and a question of where you stand. In that room, I saw Dad from vantage points I had never considered, or never even thought to consider. He was surprising me yet. Later, LaVerne Simms showed up, and I must have stared at her for an uncomfortably long time after giving her a hug.

  “Mitch?” she said.

  “God, LaVerne, I’d have known you anywhere.”

  Slowly, over several hours, our visitors left. Charley Rayburn was the last to go.

  “He was lucky to have you as a friend,” I said.

  Charley grasped my shoulder with his meaty hand.

  “You’ve been a good boy,” he said. “He was proud of you.”

  I bit my lip.

  “You know, I didn’t feel it until these last few months.”

  Charley smiled at me. “It’s never too late, kid. You’ve got to remember that.”

  In those last few days with Dad, Kelly and I had time to sort and divide his belongings. She got her letters back, and we split family pictures and other keepsakes, which were few. We agreed that his clothing and household goods would do others some good. The Montana Rescue Mission happily took them off our hands. I put the trailer up for sale and left it to a Billings agent to take care of the details.

  I kept Dad’s pickup. To do what he asked of me, I would need it.

  On Friday, we convoyed the eighty miles to Split Rail. I led Kelly up through the buttes and down into town, and we followed the gravel road that ended at the gate to Dad’s old ranch. Its current occupant was working a section of barbed-wire fence when we rolled up, and he walked down the line through the snow to see what our business was.

  “Do you remember me?” I asked.

  The rancher peered from under a cowboy hat.

  “You look familiar.”

  “You turned a shotgun on me and my father a few months back.”

  “I remember.”

  “Dad used to own this place. He said he would like to have his ashes spread here. I was wondering if that would be all right.”

  The rancher didn’t answer. He considered me. He looked at Kelly and tipped his hat. “Ma’am.”

  He studied me some more and said, finally, “Sorry to hear about your dad. Come on in.” He fished out his keys, unlocked the gate, and pushed it open.

  A vicious wind berated us as we walked up the road a piece. After about twenty-five yards, I stopped and said, “This will do fine.”

  My hands trembled. I pulled the canister from my coat pocket. I struggled to get a grip on the lid. Finally, I gave it a hard turn.

  Kelly put her hands on the canister too. The rancher stepped back in deference.

  “Well, Dad,” I said. “Go where you will.”

  We lurched the canister skyward just as the wind shifted, and it carried Dad up the road to the place he once called home.

  Kelly and I parted in Split Rail. She carried some of Dad, to fulfill the Havre part of his request. I carried the last of him. I had one more chore.

  “Thank you for bringing him back to me, Mitch,” she said. She wrapped me in a hug.

  “Thank you for being there.”

  We didn’t linger. There was little else to say.

  That night, from a room in Salt Lake, I dialed the number of a T. Swint in Milford. My heart raced.

  A girl picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Is Toby Swint there?”

  “Can I say who’s calling?”

  “An old friend.”

  I heard the phone set down, and her little-lady voice boomed, “Grandpa! Phone!”

  “Hello?”

  “Toby?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Mitch Quillen.”

  I waited. Toby didn’t speak.

  “Do you remember me?”

  “I do. It’s been a long time. How’s your dad?”

  “He just passed away.”

  “Oh, Mitch, I’m sorry.”

  “He wants to me to spread his ashes there in Milford, and he said I should see you.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow morning. Can I see you?”

  “I think so. When?”

  “Say around ten?”

  “That’ll work. Do you remember the old diner? You think you can find it?”

  “I think so.”

  “Town hasn’t changed much. You’ll be fine.”

  “So I’ll see you then?”

  “Sure
,” he said.

  I heard Toby’s voice as I started to hang up.

  “What did Jim say?”

  “He said you’d show me.”

  “Oh. OK. I’ll see you tomorrow, Mitch.”

  I hung up the phone. Milford lay a few hours in front of me. My thoughts went decades in the other direction.

  MILFORD | FEBRUARY 9, 2008

  TOBY SWINT RAISED HIS HAND and flagged me down. I was glad he did, because I wouldn’t have spotted him otherwise. As I moved in and he came into better view, I picked out pieces of my memories inside the jowly, corpulent face that looked back at me. I recalled the angled nose that dove hard toward the floor. The dimples. The lopsided, goofy half grin. The rest of the Toby I remembered had been buried deep in his hair gone gray and in the canyons of his face and in the soft angles of his body, ravaged by time and gravity.

  I shook his hand and sat down opposite him. “Thanks for signaling me,” I said. “I guess I’m an obvious stranger here.”

  He chuckled.

  “You are, at that. You sure have changed, Mitch.”

  “I was thinking the same thing about you.”

  When the waitress swung by, I asked for an iced tea. I wasn’t thirsty, but I could feel the cottonmouth coming on, just as it had the night before, when Toby was on the other end of my phone call from the motel in Salt Lake and I was scarcely sure where to begin.

  There in the restaurant fourteen hours later, I was no more certain of my footing. But when the tea was set in front of me and the chitchat was done, I told Toby what had been told to me a few days earlier.

  I watched the hulking man in front of me as I spoke, and he looked as though he might shrink into nothingness as I skirted the edges of a story too long to tell properly over a restaurant table. It had started in Milford, and I had returned for the ending. I just didn’t know where or how to find it, exactly. So I showed my cards and hoped that Toby would show his.

  After I came up for air, he fiddled with a straw before speaking.

  “I was surprised to hear from you, Mitch,” he said. “But as soon as you said your name on the phone last night, I knew. It couldn’t be anything else.”

  I smiled but said nothing. Toby rolled his ham-hock shoulders and squirmed in his chair.

  “I’m relieved. Jesus. I really am.”

  I pursed my lips. The poor bastard seemed to think that he and I had reached an end, but it was only a beginning. I had come back to this place that had cast shadows over most of my life—to get answers, to reclaim something that had been taken, and to honor a wish. It looked like I’d have to do some prodding to get what I was after.

  “So,” I said, “what am I supposed to do?”

  Toby played with his straw a while longer.

  “I’ll show you,” he said. “We’ll have to make a little drive.”

  He pushed up from the table, and I followed.

  From the passenger seat, Toby guided me out of town by a familiar route. A few minutes later, we were shooting east on the Ely Highway, that road of a long-ago summer. The winds barreled down off the foothills and whipsawed the Ranger, and I dug in, fighting against the tension from the moment and the strain of keeping the truck on the road.

  “I hated this road,” I said.

  “Yeah, so did I,” Toby said. “Still do.”

  We filled the miles with chitchat about families and jobs and the trivial frustrations of men pushing into middle age. We made a halfhearted effort to cover the years since we had last seen each other, but it was no use. Then, we had passed through each other’s lives in the way that so many people do, taking up space when we were there but not leaving much of a hole once we were gone.

  And yet…

  There Toby and I were, riding into the country in my father’s pickup, both of us holding tight to something.

  “Turn left here,” Toby said, pointing to a dirt road intersecting the highway. I eased the truck across the eastbound lane and onto the gravel.

  “Didn’t we dig around here?” I asked.

  “Yep, up and down here.”

  “How far do I go?”

  “It’s up there a piece.”

  The route battered the Ranger’s shocks, bouncing us around the cab despite my effort to poke along. Toby’s voice, a presence most of the way, fell idle, and he took to staring out the window at the country.

  It was as if I were standing outside myself, looking through my past while seeing my body propel through the present. A dull pain clawed at my gut. I wondered where we were headed. The highway fell away in the rearview mirror, and I recognized the ache in my stomach for what it was: fear.

  “This is good right here,” Toby said.

  We’d come down off a hill into a grassy draw. I pulled over. Toby stepped out of the pickup, and I did the same.

  We trudged maybe a quarter mile off the road. The shifting wind fought us, and sand slapped our faces. I hadn’t dressed for the conditions, and I jammed my numbing hands in my pockets. I was just about to suggest that we turn around and hoof it back to the truck when Toby stopped and pointed at a wash that crossed the sandy floor of the broad valley.

  “There,” he said.

  I looked around. I couldn’t see the truck.

  “What’s so special about this place?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t call it special.”

  “So why here?”

  “Jim didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Oh Christ,” Toby said.

  “What?”

  He wailed. “Oh Jesus Christ. Oh shit.”

  It took a long time to settle Toby down, to get him talking in a straight line.

  “Let’s just go back,” he said. “Let’s just go.”

  That wasn’t going to happen. Slowly, delicately, and finally, angrily, I implored him to talk. I needed this. I’d come too far.

  “You don’t need to know this, Mitch. Just walk away from it now. I would.”

  “Jesus, man, are you serious?” I said.

  Toby stared at the dirt. He swallowed hard. He didn’t speak.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Tell me now.”

  MILFORD | FEBRUARY 9, 2008

  TOBY STOOD IN THE SAND, the wind blowing through him, and he cried.

  With each whimper, my anger grew.

  “Goddammit, Toby, talk to me. You have no clue what I’ve gone through to get here.”

  The pathetic bastard tried to pull himself together. He wiped his hand against his running nose, peeling off the snot. He dabbed at his eyes and tried to find his voice.

  “OK,” he said. His eyes were red and glassy.

  “I don’t even know where to begin,” he said. “Jim and me, we buried that guy Brad up on the high side of that wash.”

  I slumped to my knees as if my legs had been taken out by a baseball bat.

  “What? When?”

  “You remember that day that Jim shut us down and went to Cedar City?”

  Brad’s face flashed in my head, over and over.

  “Yeah.”

  “We buried him that night.”

  “Jesus, Toby. Why?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “You’re wrong. I have to.”

  He couldn’t look at me when the words came.

  “Jim killed him.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  I sat on the ground, struck dumb by the revelation as Toby filled in the gaps in my last hours in Milford, the moments that my addled mind had tried to reconcile on that July day in 1979, and on so many days since.

  “Teresa and I had to come back from Beaver,” Toby said. “I went to pay for dinner, and I realized I’d left my wallet behind. So we came back. But the thing was, I couldn’t find it in my room, so I opened Brad’s door. Look, I didn’t trust the guy. I thought maybe he took it.”

  Toby looked skyward. He sniffled.

  “Mitch, you were on the bed. Brad had your pants off you, and he was—”

  Eve
rything in my stomach revolted and charged back up my gullet.

  “Shit, Mitch,” Toby said, stepping toward me. I held up my hand to keep him back, and Toby returned to where he had been standing. He watched and waited for me to control the spasms. I rode out the vomiting and the dry heaves that followed.

  “Did he…was I…”

  “No,” Toby said. “I don’t think so. It looked…” He rubbed his eyes.

  “It looked like he was just getting started.”

  A chill braced my spine. I grabbed at my scattered thoughts and forced myself not to walk away.

  “OK. Then what?”

  “You sure you want to know about this, man?” Toby asked.

  I set my jaw.

  “Then what?”

  “I tackled Brad and started whaling on him. He was stronger than me. He threw me off him and choked me. I felt like I was going to black out.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. Teresa heard what was happening. She came in and cracked him over the head with a beer bottle, and that stopped him. He’d have killed me, I think.”

  “Jesus.” It was the only word I could find.

  “I lost it, Mitch. I absolutely lost it. I couldn’t move. Teresa took control. She made me help her tie Brad up. She dressed you, and we carried you out to my truck. He drugged you, I’m pretty sure. You were gone. We couldn’t wake you up. I told her to find Jim and send him up to the house.”

  “What did Dad say?”

  “I don’t think he believed her, but he showed up. He didn’t believe me, either. I’d been bitching to him about Brad for a few days. Hell, I got into it with him at the bar one night and—”

  “And Dad punched you.”

  “Yeah, right. How’d you know?”

  “I saw it.”

  Toby shook his head.

  “Mitch, I just didn’t like the guy. I had no idea he was like that. I’m telling you, man, if I’d even thought he was, I never would have let you be alone with him. I’m sorry. I’m really fucking sorry, man.”