It's raining outside.
I've left the windows open and the heat off, and still I can't help feeling too hot on this winter day. I know what's happening to me, though that doesn't make it any less painful, any less hideous.
In the photograph, taken from a distance, I can see where my ice-sculptured likeness is sitting proud just a few hundred feet below the Eagle Peak summit. Low enough to be warmed by three season's of sun, high enough to somehow resist the melting.
And I feel like an icicle in the late afternoon of an overcast day, moist to the touch, dripping here and there just a bit, but ever so grateful for the first chill of the coming cold night.
Dry Whiskey
When I was a boy, I would look at my father and see everything right with the world. He seemed bigger, then. At the end of the day, he would come in from the fields with his shirt slung over his shoulder and the sun at his back, and every muscle in his body would be perfectly defined. I looked up to him back then, like most boys looked up to their fathers. And I had wanted to grow up to be the man he was.
The rub of it is ... time has a way of changing the order of things.
My father started drinking nearly twelve years ago, not long after my mother died of ovarian cancer. At first, though I was only eleven at the time, I thought I had understood: anything to help forget that bone-thin skeleton, that rictus smile that she had become just before her death. It was an image that had haunted me for a long time afterward. And I imagined it was an image that had never stopped haunting my father.
That was the thought going through my mind as I sat in the truck, staring at the house. How could things change so much in just ten or twelve short years? It was mid-morning. The sun was already high in the sky, and there was a dark shadow enclosing the front porch. I stared a while longer, then climbed out of the truck and closed the door.
By the time I made it to the front steps, my father had come out of the house, dragging himself across the porch like a man who had been ill for a long time now. The screen door bounced off the jamb behind him. He fell into one of the rattan chairs my mother had bought, hawked up a wad of phlegm and sent it flying over the porch railing. "What're you doing here?" he asked.
"Just thought I'd come by and see how you're doing. That's all."
"Yeah?" He scratched at the stubble on his chin, which had been growing for better than a week by the look of it. It hadn't been all that long ago that the first signs of gray had begun to sneak in. Now, it was almost all gray. "Well, I'm doing okay. Anything else?"
"Heard you were in town last night."
"Believe I was."
"Heard you got booted out of the Forty-Niner."
"Did I?"
"That's what Len Dozier says."
My father nodded slightly, as if that sounded close enough to the truth to suit him. Then he buried his face in his hands and let out a slow breath of air that seemed like an effort to control something inside that he found frightening. When he looked up again, I was reminded of the fact that this was the morning after. His coloring was ashy, his eyes bloodshot.
"I might have," he said. "I don't exactly remember."
"How'd you get home?"
"Drove."
He thought maybe he had taken Buzzard Roost Road, which was the long way home no matter how you figured it. But he really couldn't be certain. He might have gone down Old Forty-Four and across. To be honest, he finally confessed, he couldn't recall much of anything about last night. "Things get a little fuzzy after I stopped at the Forty-Niner."
He stared down at his hands then, silently, with that look of shame that I'd seen cross his face a thousand times before.
"Have you eaten breakfast yet?" I asked.
"Uh-uh."
"Then let's get some food in you, okay?" I cooked him up some eggs and bacon and poured him a cup of strong, black coffee. We sat at the table in the kitchen. For a while we talked about the drought that had settled over the state the past four years, wondering how much longer it was going to go on. It hadn't proved to be as bad as the '77-'78 drought yet – that one had been the worst in the state's history – but summer was here now and it was going to be a long time before we were likely to see any new storms move through.
After breakfast, I cleared the dishes off the table, and placed them in the sink. "I've gotta be going, Pa."
"You working today?"
"Len needs a hand repairing his tractor."
"Well, you go on, then."
"Are you gonna be all right?"
"I'll be fine."
He walked me to the front porch, the suspenders hanging loosely around his waist, his gait a bit shorter, a bit slower than it generally was when he had had a belly full of whiskey to move him along. Outside, there were shimmering waves of heat rising off the bed of my father's old pickup, and in the distance, you could see a mirage in the crease between two brown hills. It looked a little like a pond. But there hadn't been a pond there in nearly five years now. Not since before the drought.
My father had let the farm go to hell after my mother had died. It had always been a small farm: four, fifty-acre parcels, about two hundred acres altogether. It sat near the base of the foothills, with South Cow Creek flowing lazily along its southern border. He leased out two of the parcels: one for grazing, the other for bee hives in the winter months when the bees were dormant and there wasn't much call for pollinating. He had his own small herd, too, about twenty head of cattle, and that was pretty much it.
I stopped at the foot of the steps, wanting to be on my way and feeling a little guilty for it.
"You looked yet?" he asked me.
"No, Pa."
"You gonna?"
"Sure." I didn't know when this routine had first started. Like everything else, I suppose it was around the time that my mother had died. Definitely sometime after he had started drinking. I was use to it by now, and I guess because nothing had ever come of it, it seemed more like a routine than a real concern. But I gave the front end of his truck an honest look anyway.
He drove an old Chevy flatbed with aluminum running boards and an unpainted, right front fender. The fender had been replaced several summers back after he'd clipped a fence post – trying to avoid a jackrabbit, he claimed. The rest of the truck was in fairly decent shape, considering its age.
Something was wrong with the front end, though. I noticed that almost immediately. The bumper, which was second-hand scrap he had brought home from the junkyard and painted off-white, had been smashed up against the front grille. It looked as if someone had taken a sledge hammer to it. Just above the bumper, the lens of the headlight was broken, its mounting ring dangling loosely off to one side. If that weren't enough, there was also a good-size depression in the top of the left fender, where it looked as if the metal had been crimped at a weak spot almost directly over the wheel well.
Last night, on his way home, my father had hit something. "Jesus."
"What is it?" he asked.
I ran my fingers across the bumper. There was a dark stain that looked as if something had spilled over the top edge and had run down the white paint. It was shaped like a waterfall, with a mix of thick-and-thin lines flowing unevenly, top to bottom. At first thought, it looked like a kid might have taken a black Magic Marker to it. But when I looked closer, I realized the color was brownish-red. It hadn't been done by any Magic Marker. It was a blood stain. "Oh, God."
"What?"
"You did it, Pa. You finally did it." I looked up at him, and he was standing at the edge of the porch with an arm wrapped around the post like it was the only thing holding him up. His face had turned ashen, and for the first time this morning, there was a hint of sobriety behind his eyes. "The bumper's smashed, and there's some blood, Pa. You hit something last night."
I spent most of that afternoon at Len Dozier's place, working on his tractor. We got it up and running some time around four, so I stopped by the market in Kingston Mills, picked up a couple of steaks, some potatoes,
a 64 ouncer of Coke, and headed back to my father's place. When I had left, he had been sitting at the kitchen table, staring vacantly into his half-empty cup of coffee. It was only a matter of time, I figured, before the coffee was replaced by whiskey, and if that had already happened, it was a good bet I was going to find him passed out cold on the living room couch.
But that's not where I found him.
He was sitting on the front porch, next to a pile of plastic bags filled with bottles and cans. I climbed out of the truck with the grocery bag in one arm, and as I closed the door, I watched him toss an empty whiskey bottle into the air. It sailed a good fifteen or twenty feet, landed smack-dab in the middle of a feeding trough with loomix stenciled across the side, and then shattered with the harsh sound of a bottle landing in a recycling bin.
"What are you doing, Pa?"
He didn't bother to look up. As I went through the gate, he popped the tab off a can of Budweiser, dumped the contents out through an opening between the porch slats, then crushed the can and tossed it in the direction of another pile only a few feet away. It fell short, making almost no sound at all.
"Pa?"
When he finally did look up, his face was drawn and haggard, and though I had seen him like this before, this time was different. This was not a man who had hung one on while I had been gone. It was a man who had looked at himself in the mirror and had been frightened by what he had found.
"Pa, what's the matter?"
He stared at me a moment, something apparently aching silently inside him. "You ever meet Lloyd's kid?"
"Joey Egan?"
He nodded.
"Yeah, a couple of years ago, I think. When I was helping with 4H."
"He died last night," my father said mechanically. He took a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label out of the plastic bag next to him, gazed fondly at the label, then unscrewed the top and emptied out the whiskey. "It was a hit and run, off Buzzard Roost Road. He was on his way home after the school dance."
“Are you sure?"
"It was in this morning's paper," he said. Then he sent the empty bottle sailing across the yard, end over end. A spattering of sunlight glittered off the glass just before the neck of the bottle landed against the side of the trough and fell apart before my eyes. I'm not sure I even heard the sound it made. It seemed a thousand miles away just then.
"Maybe it wasn't you," I said.
"You're forgetting the blood on the bumper, Will."
"Yeah, but ... Jesus, don't you remember anything from last night?"
"Not after I left the bar." He pulled another bottle out of the bag, poured the liquid down an opening between the slats, and flung it in the direction of the front gate this time. It landed short, in a soft mound of dirt where my mother had once planted a bed of wild violets and Shasta daises, even some brown-eyed susans. Just because we live on a farm, she had said, doesn't mean we can't have a little color around the place. The bottle kicked up a cloud of dust that lazily drifted away on the evening breeze.
I plopped down in a chair next to him. "So what now?"
"You can join me if you want." He handed over a six pack of beer.
The farm sat at the west end of a valley. It was a little past five now, the last week of May. The shadows from the hills were beginning to lengthen, and I could feel the coolness of evening coming on. I popped the top off the first of the cans, poured out the contents, and began my participation in a ritual that took nearly an hour before it was finished.
We never discussed calling the police. I suppose we should have at least discussed it. But what was the point? It wasn't going to change the fact that there was blood on the front end of my father's pickup. And it wasn't going to bring little Joey Egan back, either.
In a strange way, though, what had happened had already started to bring my father back. He had been hiding inside a bottle for a long, long time, but suddenly it looked as if he might at last come out and show himself. If he did, I didn't want to risk losing him again.
We barbecued the steaks on an old grill out back that night. We had planned to eat outside at the picnic table under the dogwoods, but the mayflies were swarming, so we ended up inside at the kitchen table instead. It wasn't until we had finished the meal, and I had poured him a cup of coffee that I noticed his hands were shaking.
"Are you all right?"
He nodded, appearing unaffected. "The booze is wearing off. That's all."
"You sure?" He looked warm, beads of sweat spattered across his forehead, and weary. Though I had seen him looking much worse after an all-night bender.
"I'll be fine."
"You want me to stay tonight?"
"No, you go on home. I'll be all right."
I stacked the dishes in the sink, wiped my hands off on a kitchen towel, then turned around and stared at him. When you're a kid, you never think about your father as being old. I wasn't a kid anymore, of course. But I had thought of him as an old man for a good many years now, and I wondered briefly when it was that I had become the father, and he the son. And I wondered how much longer he was going to be with me.
"I'll come by in the morning," I said.
"No need."
"Just to check to see how you're doing."
"If that's what you want."
Joey Egan's funeral was held three days later. He was buried in a family plot in the Black Oak Cemetery on the outskirts of town, next to his mother, who had died of pneumonia the year before. After the services, I drove my father home and stayed with him that night, because I was afraid he might start drinking again. He hadn't shed a tear since the day my mother had died. But in the truck, on our way out of Black Oak, he broke down and started a long, painful crying jag.
More than just his drinking, I guess I worried about him doing something crazy that night.
The next morning, my father woke up with a hangover.
He came dragging into the kitchen sometime around nine, his eyes bloodshot, his brain apparently pounding unmercifully at the inside of his skull. He stopped at the sink, shading his eyes against the morning sun, and took a drink of water right out of the faucet. It was the one-hundred-and-seventeenth straight day without rain, and while the well hadn't gone dry, it sometimes took a while before anything came out of the spout.
"How's bacon and eggs sound?" I asked.
He shook his head guardedly. "Nothing for me, thanks."
"You gotta eat something." I had already tossed some bacon in the skillet. He hadn't been eating much of anything since the accident, and I had promised myself not to let him get away with it again. But he looked like the man of old this morning, like a man coming out of a stupor: ragged and foul and slightly out of touch with his surroundings. I didn't think he was going to be able to keep his food down even if he tried. "Christ, you didn't go on another drunk last night, did you?"
He looked up at me, his lips dry and chapped, his face expressionless. "You know I didn't. You were here all night, weren't you?"
"Then what the hell's the matter with you?"
"It's a dry drunk," he whispered hoarsely. He wiped his hands across the front of his undershirt, where one strap of his overalls was unfastened and hanging loosely.
"It happens sometimes," he said. "When you've been drinking as long as I have."
"All the more reason to get some food in your stomach."
"Maybe." He shut off the faucet and moved to the table, where he sat down a little gingerly, and let out a half-hearted sigh. "I saw Joey Egan last night," he said.
"Joey's dead, Pa."
"He came into my room and stood over my bed. There was a mess of cuts and scratches all over his face. Looked like some fool had taken the business end of a pitchfork to him. And I think his left arm was broken. It looked that way at least."
"It was a dream, Pa."
"No, it wasn't no dream. He knew how your ma died."
"Everyone knows she had cancer. That's no secret."
"But the cancer ain't what killed her, Will
."
We had never talked about my mother's death, but she had been sick for a good many months before she died. For a long time afterward, my father had always said that it was the consumption that got her. I guess it was less painful for him to think of it that way.
"I couldn't stand to watch her suffer," he said.
"What did you do, Pa?" He looked up at me, a man whose rounded shoulders reflected the heavy weight they had been carrying, and suddenly I understood everything. All the nights at the Forty-Niner. The way he had pulled back from me after she had died. The way he had pulled back from everyone. I understood it all. "You killed her, didn't you?"
"I ... I placed a pillow over her face," he said softly.
"Jesus."
"She was in so much pain …”
His bottom lip began to tremble, then suddenly he broke down and cried for the second time in less than a week. I sat next to him, my arm draped over his shoulders, feeling helpless. Guilt carried a heavy price, and my father, I suspected, had been paying a hefty markup for a long, long time.
After a while, he caught himself and took in a deep breath. "I'm all right," he said uncertainly. He stared out the kitchen window, off to the distance, where a small dust devil had kicked up and was swirling across the open field like a child swirling finger paints across a paper canvas. I had never noticed the burden in his face quite the way I noticed it just then. Here was a man who had been killing himself for years with booze, and now he was killing himself without it. I wondered if I had ever really known my father, if anyone had ever really known him.
"Things'll be all right once the booze wears off," I said weakly. "You hear?"
Through Shattered Glass Page 5
