Telling Time

by Austin Wright

  Good news. It looks like (I hope it is) a false alarm. He had a good night, his speech is back, he talked to Mother, he knows what happened. I’m in the waiting room down the hall: vending machines, cigarettes, soda, ice, microwave, gucky ice cream on the table. I haven’t seen him yet because he’s having procedures.

  Somebody named Mrs. Grummond met me (tiny plane, a dozen passengers, bumpy under the clouds, the shore, the islands, the dark jelly sea, triangles and diamonds of sunlight). Rain and her driving make me nervous. She talks. How famous you are, watches you every night. She doesn’t know I’m famous too and I don’t tell her. How nice, she says, moving to Europe so far away from your poor old parents. Assuaging my guilt, of which I have none.

  There was a confusion about what happened to Dad. Mrs. Grummond said something which I couldn’t understand, and then in the hardware store where I went for light bulbs Mr. Canay asking after my father wanted to know where he was hit, which was odd. Well, strokes hit you in the brain, so I said, Brain, which made his eyes pop. Brain? Brain? He was hit in the brain? My Lord, he didn’t realize it was that bad. I said I never heard of a stroke hitting anywhere else and he said, Aw he’s got a stroke too? He must of got that from the shock, and I said, What shock? He said, Why from the shot, and I said, What shot? and he said, Why Sam Truro’s shot, and I said, Who’s Sam Truro?

  It was like I was behind the times. He said, Don’t you know who Sam Truro is? and I said, Should I? and he said, Sam Truro’s the nut who shot your daddy, and I said, Who shot my daddy? and he said, Sam Truro, and I said, When? and he said, Yesterday afternoon, he went to the hospital, and I said, First I ever heard of it, and he said, What you didn’t know your daddy was in the hospital? and I said, Of course he’s in the hospital, and he said, So what’s the problem? and I said, I never heard about a shooting, he had a stroke, and he said, So he got the stroke after he got shot, and I said, My mother would have told me a thing like that, and he said, She didn’t?

  Well, Mr. Canay said, Maybe she didn’t because everybody knows it, it’s in the paper. He said, You ought to write it up, it’s a good story for the media. I said, I doubt it, my father was not famous outside of River City, Ohio, and he says, I mean Sam Truro, and I said, Why him? and he said, Because he took his wife and two children hostage in his house. How a man can take his own wife and children hostage Mr. Canay don’t know but he done it. Called the editor of the newspaper, Town Clerk, police, I’m holding my wife and kids prisoner in my house, until or unless you meet my demands. What demands? Mr. Canay don’t know. It makes me think if you could take me hostage for a ransom of a few thousand dollars from the city of Boston.

  According to Canay after Truro has given his message to the paper and is sitting with his rifle by the window, and the police have a car out front to keep an eye on things, along comes Dad. Walks right up to the Truro house. Neighbors standing around, one warns him, don’t go there, man. I know him, Dad says, so Sam Truro sticks his head out the window and yells, Stand back, granddaddy. And Dad—my source is Canay, who’s a narrating enthusiast—Dad says, You in trouble son? You need to talk? And Canay says Sam says, Don’t son me, granddaddy, and Dad perhaps don’t hear because he’s old (says Canay), and Sam Truro waves this big long gun in the window and Dad says, What’s that you got son? and Truro says, It’s a gun, and Dad says he always thought there was better ways to solve problems, and Sam says, you bullshitting old university sonabitch, and Dad askin’ for it goes up the door with his hand on the doorknob, You don’t mean what you say son, and Truro out the upper window with the gun pointing like screaming I told you not to son me old idiot, and bang goes the gun and down falls Dad while Truro shouts to the neighbors, Come get him, and they run up while he covers them with his gun. The ambulance carts him off to the hospital and now he’s critical and Canay says if he got a stroke on top of getting shot why that’s too bad, a lot worse than I thought. And he says that guy holding his own family hostage, don’t you think the Boston media and TV folks will come down here like you don’t get that kind a story every day just anywhere?

  I told him your field is international relations and mine is science news, but Canay he says media is media, so I told him I would tell you, which I have now done.

  I found it in the paper with Dad’s name, so I asked Mother. She said it was ridiculous. Then she started thinking and I could see her thinking when we went to the hospital. We sat in this crummy little room, I with my letter, Mom knitting (she talks to her self, I never noticed it), and when the doctor came, she asked him, You didn’t find any bullet wounds, did you? Well that unsettled the doctor quite a bit until I showed him the paper and he laughed. That’s the press for you, he said, which I resent, though we all know there’s all kinds of press.

  Mom says the Doc (his name is Eastcastle) asked her the extraordinary measures question last night. I asked how she replied and she doesn’t know. Today she says he’s so much better, the question is, what’s the word? What word? I say. The word for what the question is. Moot? I say. Moot, she says.

  Philip comes tonight. Patty tomorrow. Henry can’t decide. Nobody knows where George is. Since Dad’s improved Mother wanted to call them all and tell them not to come. It’s too late for that, I say. We’ll have a nice family visit before I go.

  ANN REALM: Dialogue

  Late afternoon, Thomas’s room in the hospital.

  Lucy: My doesn’t he look better?

  He’s propped up. His lips are drawn back exposing his teeth, cheeks concave, eyesockets bruised. The shape of his head is the same as always, more fore and aft than side to side. His eyes dark and large look at Ann.

  She thinks he is going to speak, but he doesn’t.

  Trivial conversation between Lucy and Ann.

  Abel Jeffcoat enters with a copy of the Island News.

  Jeffcoat: Here’s the story you old fake, did you see the paper?

  He reads the Truro story to Thomas, who doesn’t seem to understand.

  Jeffcoat: What have you got to say for yourself?

  Lucy: It’s utterly ridiculous.

  Thomas (speaking at last): Hello Ann.

  Ann: Hello Dad.

  Thomas: You made it back in time.

  Ann: I came back to see you.

  Jeffcoat: In time for what, old man? Great to hear your voice.

  Thomas: What’s he talking about?

  Jeffcoat: Me? This newspaper story which says you were shot. Were you shot?

  Thomas: (inaudible)

  Jeffcoat: Were you shot by Sam Truro?

  Thomas: (as if puzzling out a math problem)

  Ann: Mr. Jeffcoat, my father is not well enough for jokes.

  Mother: This is nonsense.

  Jeffcoat: Sometimes people don’t know when they’ve been shot. If the doctors have no reason to look no one ever knows.

  Thomas: Was I shot?

  Jeffcoat: Paper says you were. That’s why you’re here. You old liar, you old fake.

  Thomas: Why?

  Ann: Why do you insult him at a time like this?

  Jeffcoat: Didn’t mean to insult you, old man. (Laughs) Ain’t it a bitch, that dumb reporter.

  Ann: How did such a story get in the paper?

  Jeffcoat: I looked into it. I went to the police. Your Daddy was there. Sam Truro did take a shot at him.

  Mother: He got shot?

  Jeffcoat: Shot at. That don’t mean he got hit.

  Mother (frantic): Did he get hit?

  Jeffcoat: I doubt it. Ask the doctor.

  Ann: We did ask the doctor. (To Thomas) You tried to talk to that crazy man?

  Thomas: What crazy man?

  ABEL JEFFCOAT: What to tell Lucy and dialogue

  The source of this narrative is the young policeman Oscar Bale who told me in the police station how he was sitting in the police car in front of the Truro house, keeping a quiet watch as instructed not because this Truro had actually done anything but because he had threatened to. There had been a bunch of people aroun
d whom the police kept back from the grass because Truro had his rifle in the window, and did pop a shot into the ground every so often a while. But eventually they got bored and wandered off, leaving not much of anybody but the cops along around two-thirty of yesterday afternoon when the old Thomas comes down the sidewalk and stops and looks at the house. There’s Truro in the window with his rifle and old Thomas on the sidewalk looking at each other. The policeman warns the old man, who don’t seem to hear. Stand back, dangerous territory, something like that. Instead Thomas turns and shuffles up the walk to the house. The madman yells, waving his rifle around, Get away from here, go back. The policeman shouts him back too, but Thomas goes on his shuffling little steps disregardful. Like he meant to go right up and open that door and walk in and sit down and have a neighborly conversation, talk him out of it like he was trying to talk a rich man into bequeathing his fortune to the university. He gets half way up the walk, with something peculiar or unbalanced about the way he walks, and Truro screeching like a kid on the roller coaster, something like, Who do you think you are, God? Then bang. The first shot went into the dirt to Thomas’s right. The second ricocheted off the walk at his feet. It was such close range the shots looked like deliberate misses. Finally Thomas stops. Looks at the ground like he don’t know where he is. Here the policeman intervened like this was his entry in competition for the medal of heroics. Got out of the car with his pistol, calling to Truro, Hold your fire while I get him. Went right up that walk with Truro’s rifle pointing at him. Took Thomas by the arm, turned him around, and walked him back to the sidewalk. Got him into the police car. Meanwhile Thomas has stopped speaking, not a word. The way he looked, cross-eyed, the policeman could tell he was some kind of sick. Head lolling around more or less. No reply when asked where he lived. The policeman radioed the station, which sent out another policeman named Roger, who recognized him. It was Roger who brought him home.

  Lucy: A little disoriented.

  Jeffcoat: That he was.

  Lucy: Why couldn’t the reporter get it right?

  Jeffcoat: Fallacy, ad hoc propter hoc. Is that the one, Thomas? What did the reporter know? He knew Truro took a shot at Thomas, because that’s what they said when he investigated the noise. He heard the ambulance, discovered that’s Thomas too. Ergo, if Thomas got shot at and is consequently in the hospital he must have got hit. When the reporter went to the hospital to ask about Thomas’s condition they told him. He never thought to ask why Thomas was there because he thought he knew.

  Ann: You must get them to print a retraction.

  Thomas was speaking.

  Jeffcoat: What’s that, Tommy boy?

  Thomas: Sam Truro.

  Jeffcoat: That’s the guy.

  Thomas: Is he here?

  Jeffcoat: What?

  Thomas: Can he get in?

  Ann: Why he’s scared.

  Jeffcoat: It’s all right, Tom boy. You’re safe. He can’t get in here. He can’t even get out of his house.

  Lucy: How can anyone take his own family hostage?

  Jeffcoat: Easy.

  Lucy: He must be very frustrated.

  Jeffcoat: Hostages, it’s a cliché. He’s trying to make news with his limited resources. He hasn’t got anybody else to take hostage, so he takes his family. He doesn’t know hostages are out of date.

  Ann: They should print a retraction because if they don’t and somebody writes a biography.

  Doc Eastcastle came in. Put his hand on Thomas’s foot. Thomas do you hear? You to stay in bed, understand? Don’t get out of bed, you got that?

  I wouldn’t say he’s got much impetus to get out of bed.

  PHILIP WESTERLY: Anticipating a memoir

  Waiting for the ferry Friday night, to tell how you tried to put some of this into a poem. How you often wanted to write one, but never could. Can’t say you haven’t tried, how you used to chop your thought up into pentameter lines and let it go at that. With no place to write, do it in your head, anticipating the green notebook.

  No other person waiting on the dock

  For the last ferry of the night knows who

  This person is, nor how he named himself,

  Nor what has happened to those names,

  Specialist, ophthalmologist, eye man,

  Since he came out to watch his father die.

  Anonymous around the dock, he peers

  Blindly, squints in the dark to organize

  The lights, red, green, and white, and find

  The ferry in the gap to take him to

  The black hole where his father used to be.

  Explanatory notes in the notebook can tell how you got the idea and every choice you made, pentameter scissors trying to make something out of your wait, you with your ancient and long exploded literary ambitions. (Noticeably empty words in the first line and maybe the last? Black hole too lurid?)

  You need a form, if not poetic something else, to take care of listening to the waves slap the pilings below your feet, about this seaport you have never seen at night but only in the bright vacation summers full of the bright visiting daughters and sons of two marriages, as well as the bright children of your bright brothers and sisters, and all that institutional and organizational family picnicking cheer uprooted from around the country and repotted in this chosen outpost off the coast for the fatal final years.

  Then it was always daytime and summer full of harbor and bay and sailboat buoys motor launches fishing boats and the great white ferry to the Island blasting its horn like a poet.

  Which makes a contrast to the black hole where your father is, requiring something different for the wind blowing on the dock from the harbor bay island, the invisible ferry still an unsuccessful inference among the specky lights, undecipherable, while the sloshing sloshes expectantly around the pilings. More.

  This island cast a late deceptive shade

  Whose insulation kept the summer green

  Canceling other seasons of the year;

  And made an island of the man himself

  With no such thing as winter or bad news.

  If that’s a shade of green better, it’s still cursed by poetic varnish which not only slicks down the slosh of the waves and neutralizes the bad feeling (whatever that is) but lies about it since it’s not the Island canceling the seasons in your father’s good long life as though summer had no end but your office which has snipped off your father’s winters to comply with the work and vacation needs of your computer.

  Here comes the ferry now, a row of lights warm and shifting across the dark, blocking the miscellany of background lights but still not constructible into a recognizable boat.

  Then while the closing ship gains shape above the dock with white sides catching reflected light, and white decks shiny in the light of caged bulbs, and the last returning passengers from the island look down to watch the landing process, you can make it pentameter by chopping up at every tenth syllable

  Then while the closing ship gains shape above

  The dock with white sides catching reflected

  Light, and white decks shiny in the light

  Of caged bulbs, and the last returning

  passengers etcetera until you hit the middle of a word, at which point you must

  change the words around, while the night keeps shattering the pentameter iambs and memory boxes, and the broken point skitters in the reflection of the light buoy across the wrinkled harbor surface

  maybe free verse

  ANN REALM: Diary

  Friday, May 20. Fly Isl. DESC tiny plane bumpy jelly sea sun figs. Grummond. Rain.

  CONFUSION Canay/Truro. Shot/stroke? = stroke.

  NEWS: TW OK. Hosp. Jeffcoat fatass fake prole talk, Truro hit/miss TW, dumb reporter, brave cop. Retract paper.

  PW here: talk late. Ophthal, money/waste life, age. Lit vs career. Poetry? Memoir? How interest rdr mem dull life? No help dull life, one retina after another, no lit either.

  NE bedrm. DESC smell old sweet freshwood house
, salt sea nearby. Damp gritty desk. Dark out, rural stillness rare. Real world still? Freud on bed, send sleep Mom.

  PART THREE

  SATURDAY

  LUCY WESTERLY: To the editor, unwritten After an insomniac night.

  This is to protest the reference to my husband, Thomas Westerly, in your article about the Sam Truro hostage case. Apart from the fact he was not shot—an error you will correct—I object to your calling him controversial. Although there were controversies at River City University during his presidency (as during all regimes), your singling him out by the adjective is not neutral reporting. The word “controversial” is not neutral. It insidiously exploits its aura of euphemism to denigrate, enabling you to slander under an appearance of objectivity. Not only that, your usage implies the “academic world” has judged him, a claim you lack authority to make.

  What do you, writing in this isolated place, know about the academic world? What do you know about River City years ago? What do your readers care? We came to retire, to get away from controversy, to live the last years of our lives in peace. My husband is ill in the hospital. We have friends here. No one would know there was controversy in his life if you hadn’t said so. Your language incites pointless curiosity and reopens wounds to nobody’s benefit in nobody’s business.

  You force me to repeat what I hoped I would never have to say again: my husband has nothing to be ashamed of. He did good work at River City. He was a good man and he was loved. How many wives will say that much about their husbands?

  PHILIP WESTERLY: To his sons David and Charles

  In Thomas’s study while waiting for Lucy to serve lunch.

  Writing from the Island, where your grandfather’s had a stroke. I came thinking he was dying, but he’s better now, lucid but weak. He has a private room on the third floor, a picture window with a view of the parking lot. The harbor’s on the other side, out of sight. I visited him and we spoke of family and island news.

  I want you to think of your grandfather as a truly good man. The real thing. There aren’t many in the world. In this evil cynical world, a person can still be good. If you don’t believe it, let him be your example.