by Lee Martin
Looking at it now, Lois knew the patience Merlene needed to do the hearts in all different shades of red and then frame them with a reddish-brown border. Lois could imagine her hoping that time would hold out until she finished, knowing she’d done everything she could for Wesley and now there was only this—this quilt to remind him of all the love they’d shared. Maybe in some small way, whenever he felt sad or afraid or alone, he’d be able to look at that quilt and think of her.
He was rubbing his hand gently over one of the hearts now.
“You miss your mother, don’t you?” Lois said to him.
“She wouldn’t like what I did.”
Lois sat down on the edge of the bed. “No, she probably wouldn’t, but she’d forgive you. I have absolutely no doubt about that.”
Captain looked at her. “She would?”
“Yes, she would. She loved you for you. No matter what, you were her son.” Lois scooted closer to him and held her arms open. “Come on,” she said. “Let me hug you.”
She sat there a good while, letting him press his face into her neck, patting his back while he sobbed, telling him over and over, “Hush, now. Hush. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Finally, once Captain had cried himself out, Lois asked him if he’d eaten anything.
“Not since lunch yesterday.”
“Lordy, you must be starving. Get dressed. I’m going to make something for you.” He looked at her, hesitating. “There’s only one thing to do when trouble comes,” she said. “I know it for a fact. Get out of bed every morning. Keep moving ahead.”
She went back to the living room, where Biggs and Shooter were still standing. Shooter was leaning against the wall, his head bowed. He was rubbing the back of his neck. Biggs had his hat in his hand, turning it around by its brim.
Lois said to Biggs in a soft voice, as if it were only the two of them in the room, “Our baby’s gone, and her babies, too, and nothing’s going to change that. Wesley Rowe? He’s still alive. I don’t want any hurt to come to him.”
Not everyone was willing to overlook Captain’s part in the fire. Even though it was generally known that Ronnie had gone to the trailer with the intent to burn it, had spread that gas before having a change of heart and driving away, there were still folks who couldn’t get beyond the fact that if Captain, a boy who wasn’t right from the get-go, had been home in his bed as he should have been that night and not out there striking matches, Della and her three children would still be alive. Too many people had invested too much in the suspicion that Ronnie set the fire, and even though he was the one who’d pay the price, they couldn’t help but spread the blame to Captain as well.
Boys at school made goat noises sometimes when he was near. They flicked lit matches at him and called him Scarecrow after the character in The Wizard of Oz.
Whether it was those boys who night after night came driving by the Rowe house, their car and truck horns blasting, or else adults who’d forgotten how to be civil, no one could say.
Then someone went too far. Someone came one night when Shooter and Captain were in Phillipsport doing their grocery shopping, and they went to work on the side of the barn with a red spray paint can. It was the side people could see from the road. They could drive by and see the gigantic red letters spelling out KILLER.
That was too much for Missy. She knocked on Shooter’s door and told him she was sorry for his trouble.
“I don’t approve of the way you handled things,” she said, “but you and Captain don’t deserve this.”
“Yes, I do,” he said, and then he closed the door.
_________
Ronnie told Angel he was sorry. He should have told her everything the night she showed him his pocketknife, hoping that he’d have some explanation. He did, but he didn’t know how to say the right words to her then, so he kept quiet, and in his silence, a horrible possibility took life.
“You know it all now,” he told Angel. “You know I got mad at your mother, and I started to do something bad.” Even though he’d never wanted his girls to know that he’d had thoughts about burning the trailer, had gone as far as spreading some gasoline, it was out in the open now, and he had no choice but to own up to it. “But I stopped myself. I got back to a better way of thinking. I patched the hole in the trailer to keep the pilot light on the furnace from going out. I had no idea you were all inside. I wish I’d knocked on your door. Maybe your mother would have asked me to come inside, and then who knows what might have happened.” His voice got so shaky then he could barely make the words he knew he had to say. “After it happened—after the fire—I was afraid you’d never want me. I didn’t know how to tell you I’d been there that night. I was there, but not when I needed to be. Not when I might have made a difference. I’ll know that the rest of my life.”
Angel said, “Brandi lied to me when she was in the hospital and she told me the story of that night.”
“She didn’t want you to think bad of me,” Ronnie said, “and right now I’m scared to death that you’ll never forgive me.”
Angel threw herself into his arms. She held him tight. She told him how she’d seen sparks outside her bedroom window just before the fire, but she hadn’t thought to get out of bed and move the ash box to the compost the way she was supposed to have done earlier that evening. She told him about how her mother had awakened her that night and told her the trailer was on fire.
“She told me to wake the others and help them to get out.” Here she paused, her breath coming hard, reliving it all in her mind. “I didn’t do it. Hannah was awake, and I told her to run. I ran with her. If I’d only tried to help.”
“Shh.” Ronnie rocked her in his arms. “Shh, now, baby. Shh. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Ronnie waited while the State went through the process of discovering all the facts. In Illinois, his attorney told him, reckless homicide was a Class 3 felony, punishable by two to five years in prison, but probation was a possibility—a strong possibility, the attorney said, given the tragic circumstances and the fact that there were four daughters who needed their father.
Ronnie was able to hire his attorney because Missy Wade turned over the account at the bank to him.
When he called to thank her, she said, “I don’t imagine I’ll ever get over any of this.” Then she told him the story of the day in the bank when her silence started the rumor that he’d had something to do with the fire. “Even though you did what you did, it wasn’t right of me to let that gossip spread, and I’ve got no right now to keep watch on that money.”
The State decided not to prosecute. Even though Ronnie had gone to the trailer that night, he’d done so on the assumption that Della and the kids were at Lois and Wayne’s. Yes, he’d meant to set the trailer on fire, but in the end he’d come to his senses. He’d held his temper in check. He’d never meant for anyone to come to harm.
And now there were his girls to see to, those girls who had suffered enough.
The court put Ronnie on probation and left the question of custody of the children to another hearing.
Missy testified. She spoke of Ronnie’s love for the girls.
“He made mistakes,” she said. “We all made mistakes. But at the end of the day it’s clear to me that he loves those girls. I had no business to try to take them from him, and I wouldn’t want to now. He’s their father. I don’t believe he means them any harm, never meant to hurt them at all.”
Laverne Ott said the options were few. Lois and Wayne were in poor health, and if Missy and Pat, the godparents, were saying they trusted Ronnie, and if the court wanted to avoid a foster home situation, as Laverne believed they did as long as a biological parent was capable and willing, then the proper thing to do would be to entrust the girls’ care to Ronnie.
Finally, the judge asked Laverne to bring each of the girls individually to his chambers.
He asked them, one by one, where they wanted to live.
Angel was direct. “Brandi ne
eds us. We want to be a family.”
Hannah was earnest. “I love my father.”
Sarah had a puzzled look on her face. “Aren’t kids supposed to live with their parents?”
Emma simply said, “Daddy and Brandi.”
“You want to live with your daddy?” the judge asked.
“Yeppers,” Emma said.
Then the judge asked to speak to Ronnie and Laverne.
“Mr. Black, I can’t say I’m pleased with you.”
“No, sir,” Ronnie said.
“You can see why this is a difficult decision.”
“Yes, sir, I can. I’ve not always been an upright man, but this has changed me. I’ve owned up to everything. I’m just hoping for a chance to keep my girls.”
The judge tapped the end of a pencil on his desk and studied Ronnie a good long while.
“Children’s Protective Services will have a sharp eye on you. Isn’t that right, Miss Ott?”
“You can count on it,” Laverne said.
“And this court will be watching you. Mr. Black, I feel you’ve lost enough. Make sure you make good on this second chance.”
Brandi and Ronnie gave the story of Captain a good deal of thought on those evenings when Ronnie sat with her while she was lying in bed as her doctor had commanded. Brandi had already thought hard about what she knew about Ronnie. He’d gone out to the trailer that night meaning to burn it. He spread that gasoline. Then he saw a hole in the siding and got his senses back. He tried to do a good thing. He patched that hole and then he came back to town and got into bed beside her. He was still there. After everything they’d gone through, he was still there. The baby was coming, and she wasn’t alone. She told Ronnie to forgive himself for what he almost did that night. She told him to believe in love.
Her due date at the first of July seemed far in the distance, but neither she nor Ronnie complained. Time seemed to slow down for them, and that’s exactly what they needed. Too much had been happening too quickly. Now they had the drowsy evenings of winter. They had time to talk.
They played board games with the girls. Then once Ronnie had them off to bed, he and Brandi lay close together, and he rubbed his hand gently over her stomach and felt the baby kick, and the joy of those moments was so pure and good there was no need for either of them to say a word.
In the moonlight slanting through the window and falling across their faces, they began to talk.
Brandi said, “I bet you’re sorry you ever ended up with me.”
No, Ronnie told her. He wasn’t sorry. “We’re going to have a baby,” he said.
“Sometimes I still have trouble with what you did.” She reached over and took his hand. “I won’t lie about that.”
They lay together awhile, not speaking. Then Ronnie said, “It could have been true. All of it. I was that close to setting that trailer to burn.”
“What I’ve decided is maybe we’re all that close to doing things we’d regret. The right chain of circumstances, and there we are.”
“I know, but still.”
“We both have to let it go. Your girls need us. This baby needs us. Day by day, we’ll go on.”
Ronnie knew in his heart that Captain hadn’t meant for that match to catch the gas on fire. At night, he and Brandi talked it over.
Sure, maybe Captain didn’t have any business taking it upon himself to even think about burning down the goat pen and shed—and on a windy night like that, no less—but Ronnie knew, from all the time he’d spent with Captain while he worked on the Firebird, the boy was always eager to please. Ronnie knew how close he felt to Della, especially after his mother died.
“He didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” Ronnie said to Brandi. “Shooter should have been better with him, but who am I to say that? I guess I’m not exactly the Father of the Year.”
“I imagine it’s been hard for him to raise a boy like Captain by himself,” Brandi said.
Ronnie agreed. “I’m sorry now to see the way some folks are treating them. So much of that is my fault.”
That’s when Brandi had the idea of taking out ads in the Gold-engate and Phillipsport newspapers.
“Why would anyone listen to me?” Ronnie asked. “They’re ready to run me out of town.”
“You’ll see,” said Brandi, and then she told him how she thought it might work.
When the ad came out in the papers, it was the talk of Phillipsport and Goldengate. Mr. Samms and DeMova Dugger at the Wabash Savings and Loan saw it when Mr. Samms stepped out of the office that afternoon to appraise a property and came back with the Messenger.
“Good for him,” Mr. Samms said after he’d showed the ad to DeMova. “He said it just right, and I hope people listen. And he had the courage to put his name to it.”
“It was a horrible accident,” DeMova said. “That’s what it was. That poor boy didn’t mean to burn that trailer.”
In Goldengate, the ad came out that same day in the Weekly Press. Anna Spillman sat at the counter at the Real McCoy and leafed through a copy on her afternoon break. When she saw the ad, she recalled how Ronnie spent that night with her when Brandi put him out. He was lost that night, all scraped out. “What am I going to do?” he asked her. “Other folks know trouble,” she told him. “You just keep remembering you’re not alone.”
When she saw the words he’d put in the paper, she felt her breath catch. “Oh, my,” she said, and Herbert Quick came around the counter to see what she was reading.
“That’s the truth.” He tapped his finger on the ad. “You have to admire a man for saying the truth, no matter what you might happen to think of him.”
Not everyone agreed. Taylor Jack read the ad and thought to himself, Who in the hell does he think he is, saying something like that?
“And in the newspaper, no less,” said Roe Carl the next day at the IGA. “Leave it alone, if you ask me.”
Missy read the paper before bed, and the ad nearly took her breath away. When she got down on her knees to pray that night, she asked God to forgive her for whatever mistakes she’d made all because she’d been so eager to have children of her own.
Shooter Rowe saw the ad when he sat down with the paper after supper. “Come in here,” he said to Captain, who was finishing drying the dishes. “Come look what Ronnie’s done.”
Captain looked over his father’s shoulder as he read the ad aloud.
“In spite of everything.” Shooter’s voice was strong and clear in the quiet house. “I still believe that people are really good at heart.” That part of the ad was in quotation marks, and Shooter knew it came from the diary Anne Frank kept while in hiding from the Nazis. He knew this because the book of that diary had been one of Merlene’s favorites. She’d written out that quote in her beautiful handwriting and kept it in her Bible. In the ad, Ronnie’s words came after the quotation, and Shooter read them aloud, too. “I can’t change what’s done. Neither can you. We all have lives to live. We need to help one another. We need to forgive. That’s what I aim to do. In my heart of hearts, I hope you’ll do the same.”
For a good while, neither of them spoke. Then Captain said, “He’s talking about me.”
Shooter let the paper settle down onto his lap. “He’s talking about all of us, Wesley. He’s saying we ought to know we’re all doing the best we can.”
Brandi had read The Diary of Anne Frank while she’d been on bed rest, and the part about believing that people were good stuck with her. After she’d written that down for the ad, she told Ronnie to just speak from his heart.
“What do you want to say to folks?” she asked.
He thought for a minute. “I want to tell them we all mess up and do things wrong. Things happen and we can’t go back and change them. All we can do is try to be better. Something like that.”
“Keep talking,” Brandi said. “We’ve got all night. I’ll help you say it just the way you want.”
At that moment, when she lifted the pen from the paper, the frayed
friendship bracelet that Hannah had woven for her fell from her wrist.
“Looks like I get my wish,” she said.
“What did you wish for?”
“This. All of this right now. You and me and the girls.”
They were alive to him now more so than they’d ever been. Everyone who mattered to him was more alive—the girls and Brandi and Pat and Missy Wade and Shooter and Captain, and, yes, Wayne and Lois, even the woman Della had been in his last days with her, the woman who loved having a baby in the house. They were more alive to him because of the part of the story he swore he’d never tell, the part that left him knowing in a way he never had how scared they all were, how broken.
He hadn’t told Ray Biggs and his deputy everything about the night the trailer burned. He hadn’t told it all to Brandi. He wished he could. He especially wished he could say it to Captain, the one who most needed to hear it.
Ronnie wanted to tell him that when he first pulled away from the trailer that night, he glanced up to his rearview mirror, and he saw Captain standing at the edge of the trailer looking after him as if he expected him to change his mind and come back.
Just a shadowy figure out there in the cold, but it was enough to remind Ronnie of how he’d felt all the times he’d been the new boy at a foster home, how all of the other foster kids knew one another, and he was too shy to try to be their friend. How he waited for them to come to him, to treat him with kindness, but that rarely happened. More often than not, they thought him standoffish and weird, and they left him to the misery he nursed in his heart.
“If you’d just smile more,” a helpful boy said to him once, “maybe people would like you.”
He’d been that boy, the one who wouldn’t smile.
When Ronnie saw Captain standing there in the moonlight, he almost stopped the Firebird, almost threw it in reverse and went back to the trailer, but he couldn’t imagine what he’d say to explain why he’d returned. He had no words for what he wanted, no words at all. He only knew that deep down he wanted to stand there again with Captain, who refused to judge him, who knew from experience that people were mostly just who they were and all you could do was try to love them for that. But as much as Ronnie wanted to give himself over to Captain’s goodness, he was too ashamed to admit that he needed it. He was too ashamed to admit that he’d needed it all along, that Captain, a boy he’d only thought he was humoring with his attention, had mattered to him much more than he’d known, had been the one who could have saved him.
