A small, round woman, as I recalled her, curiously voluptuous, though in her forties she had seemed ancient to me at the time.
We were moving down the road now, jostling along its narrow ruts.
“As for Lila, she just stood there with her arms folded,” Lonnie said. “You know how she is. Can’t get more than a one-word answer out of that girl.”
Her voice raced through my mind, fervent, full of spirit, certain that with her the cycle would be broken, all the poverty and blighted hope of those who’d come before her. I’m going to find a way out of Waylord, Roy. You need to find one too.
Until then, I thought I had.
Chapter Four
My father was sitting in his bed when I got back to the house, his hair in its usual disarray, the bed’s one sheet wadded up and hurled into a corner.
“Where you been, Roy?” he asked sharply.
“With Lonnie Porterfield.”
“What business you got with him?”
“I don’t have any business with him. I just paid a visit.”
“Mighty long visit.”
“We got caught up in something.”
“His wife left him, you know.” My father said it with satisfaction. “Ain’t no woman had nothing to do with him since then.”
My father’s pleasure at Lonnie’s failed marriage struck me as purely malicious, as if his own unhappy marriage could find comfort only in the knowledge that other marriages had been no less stricken.
“Probably didn’t give a damn about him by the time she left,” my father added. “Probably raised his hand to her and that’s why she left him.”
“What makes you think that?”
“ ’Cause that’s the way they are, them Porterfields.” Before I could respond, he added, “Got a skinny little daughter that works at the Crispy Cone. Wild as hell, I heard.”
“Who tells you all this, Dad?”
He appeared to resent the question. “I keep track of things.”
“The Porterfields in particular, it seems.”
“What do you care who I keep track of?”
“I don’t, but—”
“Just people in books, them’s the only ones you take an interest in.”
I picked up the sheet, began folding it. “You have any preference for supper?”
“Preference,” my father said, as if the word were too fancy to be uttered in his presence, lay like a silk shirt on his rough back. He plucked a magazine from the table beside his bed, the tattered remnant of something called Boxing News. “Just a glass of lemonade.”
For a moment, I peered at him wonderingly, as I had when I was a boy, still vaguely yearning to uncover that part of him that remained deep and unfathomable, and yet sometimes broke the surface, like the black fin of a shark.
He glanced up from the page. “What is it?” he barked, looking me dead in the eye.
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
He returned to his magazine. “Put lots of ice in that lemonade,” he snapped. “And lots of sugar.” With that he rolled onto his side, purposely giving me his back.
I went to the kitchen, pulled out one of the old jelly jars my mother had used for glasses, this one painted with bright red cherries. She’d called it her “collection,” and pretended it had value, when, in fact, it had served only to demonstrate how little we’d had, “collections” of plates, twine, tinfoil, paper bags, a bounty of want and scarcity.
Most of what she’d gathered together had been lost since her death, so that now the old wooden cabinet contained only a few glasses and a short stack of chipped plates. Drawers that had once overflowed with match-books, buttons, rubber bands, were now very nearly empty. As for her clothes, my father had burned them in a ragged pile the day after her funeral, poking it idly with a stick as the stinking smoke curled upward into a washed-out sky.
I took the old pitcher my grandmother had given her as a wedding gift, mixed water, sugar, bottled lemon juice, then plucked an ice tray from the refrigerator, held it under running water, tapped the cubes into the pitcher.
My father now sat Indian-style, staring out the window, spidery blue veins on naked legs so white they seemed never to have been touched by sun.
“Here’s your lemonade,” I told him.
“You put in plenty of sugar?”
“Until the water wouldn’t dissolve any more.”
He took the glass, raised it above his head, studied the layer of white granules that rested at its bottom, then took a long swig, tucked the glass between his legs, and glanced toward the window again. “You sure you want to stay till the end, Roy? Till I’m dead.”
“I told you I would.”
He took another swig of lemonade, his eyes following the flight of a crow over the pasture. “You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t.”
He took another sip, lowered the glass into his lap. “Sometime before fall, then. That ain’t long, is it?”
“No, it’s not.”
“I heard somewhere that a bug lives about a month.” He laughed, his yellow teeth showing briefly, several chipped and crooked, treated with the same indifference with which he’d treated everything else. “I got about the same time as a bug, right, Roy?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
He looked at me irritably. “That the way you answer them schoolkids you teach? Can’t just say ‘I don’t know.’ Got to say it fancy. ‘I wouldn’t know.’”
“It’s just a way of speaking, Dad.”
“Teacher talk, that’s what it is.”
He’d always been contemptuous of my work, considered it fit only for old maids, my being a teacher offering yet more evidence that there was something missing in me, the main part of a man. He’d never encouraged my early ambition to go to college, nor taken any pride in the fact that I’d finally gotten a degree. But now he seemed at war with everything I had become since leaving Waylord, not only my choice of career, the fact that I lived on the other side of the country, but with my grammar, my vocabulary, everything.
But I also knew that something else was going on in him, old demons clawing at his mind, my “fancy” language merely the grappling hook that had dragged something more unsettling from the swamp.
He drained the last of the lemonade and shoved the empty glass toward me. “Anyway, when it comes to dying, I’d rather go like a bug. Not thinking about it.” His eyes drifted toward the old ball bat that rested at a slant against his bed and which he’d begun to use to lift himself from the bed. “One thing’s for damn sure,” he said, now fingering its handle, “you won’t see me go out like Archie done.”
So that was it, I thought. He was thinking about Archie, his life and death pressing like a red-hot iron against his flesh.
“Crack like Archie done. Pissing and moaning.”
In an instant, I recalled my brother during the only time my father had gone to see him in the county jail. He’d been taken completely unaware by the seizure that had left Archie balled up and whimpering on the concrete floor of his cell, my father nudging him with his boot, demanding that he get up, his eyes whipping back and forth from Archie’s crumpled body to where Wallace Porterfield stood just outside the bars, arms folded over his huge chest, a look of absolute contempt in his eyes.
“Shaking all over,” my father muttered. His mouth took a cruel twist. “Life ain’t worth it. If I could turn it off, just like that light switch there, I’d do it right now. It don’t mean a thing to me.”
“It’s different when you’re young. When you have some life left.”
His eyes slashed over to me. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that Archie wasn’t like you, Dad. He wasn’t ready to die. It’s different when you’re young.”
“No, it ain’t,” my father snapped. “It ain’t no different at all. It don’t matter, young or old. You’re the same man facing it all the way through. You know why? ’Cause a man don’t never change. Take you, Roy. You ain’t changed on
e bit since you was a kid. You still got that same look on your face. Looking down your nose. At everything. This here place. Me.”
“I don’t look down my nose at you, Dad.”
My father laughed. “Oh, you’re nice about it. You don’t say nothing. But I can see it, Roy. What you really think. That I’m just some old ignorant bastard from the hills. But let me tell you something, they’s things I know that you ain’t got no idea about. Things you believe that I ain’t never believed. Stupid things.”
“Like what?”
He started to blurt out something, then held it back.
“Like what?” I said again.
“Like no matter how much you got, they ain’t nothing to it if you ain’t got nobody along with you.”
I had no doubt as to where this was going, another assault upon my failure to produce a family, even one as doomed and miserable as his own.
“I live alone because I want to,” I said, then got to my feet. I was halfway to the door when he drew me back with a question.
“What was it, by the way? That thing you got caught up in this afternoon. With Lonnie Porterfield.”
“I went up to Waylord with him.”
“Waylord?” The very mention of the place appeared to fill my father with revulsion. “What’d you go up there for? There ain’t nothing up there but bad luck.”
“Somebody found a body along Jessup Creek. I happened to be over at Lonnie’s when he heard about it. So I went along with him. Just for the ride, you might say.”
He thumped a cigarette from the pack by his bed. “Whose body was it?”
“Clayton Spivey.”
He said nothing, but I could see that he recognized the name.
“After that we drove up to Lila Cutler’s place,” I added. “You remember Lila, don’t you?”
“ ’course I remember Lila. She was the only girl you ever brought home.”
I saw her as she’d come toward him that night, my father rising to greet her, offering his hand, taking hers gently into his, a strange tenderness in his eyes, as if, at that moment, he’d striven to be some other man he’d failed to be.
“For a while it looked like you was gonna marry Lila,” my father added. “Have kids. Maybe have a normal life. A family.”
“I’m glad you had such high hopes for me, Dad,” I said.
“A family,” my father repeated, his eyes on the charred tip of the match. “Not like it turned out.”
“My life’s really not so bad,” I told him.
He seemed amazed that I could come to such a conclusion.
“But you ain’t got nobody, Roy,” he said. “No wife. No kids of your own. You can’t say that’s normal, can you?”
“It’s the way I want it.”
“But why would you want that? Living alone. With nobody.”
“It’s my life. Drop it.”
“But why would you want a life like that? No family, I mean.”
I stared him in the eye. “Maybe because of what my life was like when I had a family.”
My father’s face jerked into a scowl. “Oh shit, you’re not going to start whining about all that again, are you, Roy?”
“We weren’t happy, Dad. Archie. Mama. None of us was happy.”
“Whining, whining. Goddamn, Roy. Why don’t you just get in that car of yours and go on back to California?”
“Maybe I will,” I said sharply.
Something exploded behind his eyes. “Then do,” he snarled. “You don’t have to stay here. Hell, no, by God. I never asked you to come and I ain’t asked you to stay. You can go on back to that … whatever it is. That little room you got. Tend to them little snot-nosed kids that ain’t your own.” He shook his head disdainfully. “Pitiful, Roy. A pitiful life you got.”
I watched him evenly, determined to hold my temper in check. “Try to get this through your head, Dad. My life is none of your business.”
He shrugged, and the volcanic outburst that had erupted from him seconds before settled no less abruptly.
“You’re right,” he said, his tone now oddly broken. “Forget it, Roy. Forget I said anything. Turn that TV on. I don’t want to talk no more. It’s time for my show. Go read your book or something.”
But I remained in place, determined to probe at least some small part of his shadowy ire. “I’d just like to know what you get out of it.”
“Get out of what?”
“Out of insulting me the way you do. What have I done to deserve that?”
He released a long, weary breath, so that for a moment I actually thought he might reveal some clue as to why he found me so pitiful. “You know what your problem is, Roy? You can’t take a joke. You never could.”
He waited, watching me. I knew what he wanted, a fiery return, a dog’s angry snarl.
Instead, I simply faced him squarely and told the dreadful truth as far as I knew it. “You don’t like me, Dad. You have no respect for me or for what I do for a living or for how my life turned out.”
“You talk like a man that’s already give up on everything, Roy. That ain’t got no fight left in him.”
“I left my ‘fight’ when I left Kingdom County,” I replied hotly. “So let’s put that subject to rest, shall we?” I turned to leave, but he drew me back.
“Run off and bury your nose in a book,” he said. “But it don’t change the fact that if you don’t fight for nothing, you don’t amount to nothing.”
I whirled around. “What should I fight for, Dad?”
“That’s for you to come to,” my father shot back. “But I’ll tell you one thing, you don’t forget them that done you dirt. Like you done with Lonnie today. That burns my ass, Roy. Paying that snot-nosed little bastard a visit. Christ Almighty, of all the people for you to go visiting. Forgetting what he done that night, what he said.”
“For God’s sake, he was a kid when that happened. Eighteen. Drunk.”
“He knew what he was doing, that boy. And you know that too. Drunk or a kid or whatever, he knew exactly what he was saying.”
“It was over twenty years ago, Dad. What difference does it make now? Or even then, for that matter?”
“Then?” my father yelped. “I’ll tell you what difference it coulda made then. It coulda been Lila wouldn’t never have wrote you that letter if Lonnie hadn’t said them things.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Maybe she got to figuring How come Roy didn’t do nothing about that? How come Roy just let it go?”
“And on that basis threw me over? I don’t think so.”
“All I know is she could have made a good wife for you, Roy. A normal life.”
“All that’s over and done with, Dad.”
My father cut his eyes toward the blank screen of the television. “Ain’t nothing ever over and done with, Roy.”
“I’m not going to discuss this any further,” I said.
“‘Any further,’” my father imitated. “I ain’t gonna discuss this here ‘any further.’”
We stared at each other icily for a moment, then he shrugged. “I just thought she could have made a man out of you, that’s all.”
He’d said this last remark without ire, nor any hint of accusation, and yet I felt his words like small exploding shells.
“Well, she didn’t,” I said. “And after her I never tried again. End of story.”
And with that I slammed out of the room, rushed down the corridor and out into the yard, and drew in a long, cleansing breath. I knew at that moment that if I could have willed my father dead, simply flipped that mythical switch, I would have done it.
But it’s a hard thing to wish your father dead. And so, with night steadily falling around me, I found myself listening as he dragged himself about his room, attentive to any sign of distress, any sign that he needed me. I knew I owed him nothing and yet I couldn’t stop myself from stealing a look through the window, a glimpse of his emaciated form, the right shoulder hunched, his arm bare in the sleeve
less T-shirt, skin loose and flabby now, with nothing left of those rippling muscles that had dug coal and cut wood for over fifty years.
Such was the fate of sons, I thought as I continued to wait out the night, listening to the frail chirp of the crickets and katydids, the air cooling now as I tried to cool, watching mutely as the moon retraced its iron circuit, as tightly controlled as I strove to be, solitary and duty-bound, the man Lila Cutler had not made.
Chapter Five
Awindblown summer rain swept in the next morning. I made coffee in my mother’s battered tin percolator. I remembered her at the stove in the early morning, her hair gathered in a bun behind her head, already an old woman, it seemed to me, though she’d not yet reached forty.
Even now, solitary though my life had been, I couldn’t imagine the cold depths of my mother’s loneliness, the deep isolation of living with a man who did not love her, and never had. I couldn’t imagine their courtship, my father as a young blade strutting before her, she the object of his pursuit, though I knew that there must have been such a moment in their lives. In fact, it seemed proof enough of a dry and loveless marriage that I could not imagine that earlier time, but only the spoiled residue of it, swollen and malodorous, a blackened fruit.
By the time I was eight, my father had seemed hardly a husband at all. He often took his evening meal in silence, then strode directly to the living room and sat chain-smoking through the night.
Mornings, he lingered in his bedroom as long as possible, opening and closing drawers like someone who couldn’t decide what to wear, though his wardrobe, if it could be called that, had never consisted of more than a few shirts and three or four pairs of work pants.
He’d never taken breakfast with the rest of us, but only grabbed a mug of coffee as he trudged past the kitchen table, then on through the front door, banging the screen behind him, and out to his pickup.
The groan of its engine, the scratch of the tires as he pulled away, had always been followed by a flood of relief that he was gone, taking the weight of his unhappiness with him like a heavy bag.
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