by Martin Clark
Gail’s face registered the news. She shook her head from side to side. “It’s not your fault.” She peered up at him. “And I’m not just saying that. You did the right thing for the right reasons. Don’t beat yourself up over it. Heck, the way kids are, even if you’d taken his license, he might’ve still been driving. Suspended or not, people get behind the wheel. Who can say, Custis? And who could’ve known?”
“Well, people are gonna start gossipin’ about it, and I’m sure it’s a story with some appeal in certain quarters, so I just wanted to put it on the table, here and now. Mason had nothin’ to do with the decision, never even knew about it. It was my case, my call. Now I gotta drag up there and tell him.”
“I’m so sorry for all of it,” Gail said. “But the kind of man Mason is, he won’t hold it against you.”
“Doesn’t make it any easier.” Custis sighed and pushed off from the wall. “At any rate, how ’bout you printin’ the whole ball of wax, let the radio know and maybe the Roanoke Times. I’ll get my ashes and sackcloth and wait for the MADD pickets and the minions from the cable networks.” He smiled but didn’t mean it.
“So Mason wasn’t involved?” Gail asked, though the answer probably wouldn’t have made any difference in terms of her story.
“Nope. Completely me. He’s always trusted me to manage my cases. You’re welcome to check the paperwork.”
“No reason to.”
There were several people in Mason’s office when Custis arrived, and he went directly to his friend and they wrapped each other up, embracing and holding tight. They were emotional and unguarded, but neither was crying or overwrought. Custis’s mouth was so close to Mason’s ear it almost touched: “This is totally on me, brother. My fault. I hope you’ll forgive me.” The room was quiet except for sniffles and the gentle, padded sound of a woman’s steady weeping, and most of the visitors heard what Custis said.
“It couldn’t be helped. Not your fault. No one could ask for a better friend or partner.” Mason had recovered somewhat, was operating on adrenaline and numb instinct, his world pared down to the very next noun and verb, the person immediately in front of him, the effort to blink and breathe. The rest was nothing, scrambled—gray, grainy static beyond shrunken margins. He made space between them so he could see Custis. “I was right there with you, and—”
“I wish I could have it to do again,” Custis interrupted, talking over Mason. He took a step away. “I can’t tell you how…how…” He gave up, hung his head, wiped a wrist across both eyes. “I can’t believe it.”
“I know,” Mason assured him.
“It’s God’s will,” said a lady from the Baptist church standing beside Sadie Grace. She meant well, had come to see what she could do to comfort the family. “As hard as it is to understand, we know Allison’s in a far better place.”
“Yeah, and so is our daughter,” Mason snapped. “Maybe the Good Lord should have his spectacles checked before he goes down the list again. Or get better information from his agents on the ground. I don’t want to hear that shit right now.” He was allowed the breach of faith by everyone there, even his churchgoing mother, and the Christian lady who’d made the suggestion understood why he was so distraught and didn’t think poorly of him or take umbrage. “How about riding with me and Darrell to the hospital?” he said to Custis after the room fell silent, and the three men started to leave the office, the trooper leading the way. Mason stopped at the threshold and addressed his mother. “I’d appreciate it if you could go by the house. I expect I’ll need some help.”
“Of course,” Sadie Grace told him. She crossed the room and touched him on the arm, sixty-four years old, her knee not completely reliable, the joint sabotaged by arthritis.
The family night was held at the high school auditorium because so many people wanted to pay their respects. The wait stretched into the parking lot, some in the line straight from work and still wearing their blue shirts and steel-toes, others in coats and ties, overalls, sport jackets and Sunday best for many of the ladies. A few visitors barely knew Mason but came because they’d received a fair shake in court or a kind hearing of a past problem, and even reclusive old Hazel Overby, a widow with a dip of snuff rolling around her dentures, stood for hours waiting to see the Hunts. No telling how much food was brought to Mason’s house, plate upon plate, chicken, cakes, casseroles, pies, baked beans, cold-cut trays, country hams and Crock-Pots filled with stew. The local arts co-op collected nearly five thousand dollars in memorials. All the Patrick County attorneys wrote checks to fund an Allison Hunt scholarship. There was not enough room in the funeral home’s chapel for the flowers.
After a simple, two-hymn service, several hundred people drove from the chapel and encircled Mason and Grace at the Stuart Cemetery, virtually every one of them nicked or saddened by the death. Standing there graveside and wearing a dark suit, Mason was struck by the thought that spring was not the season in which to die. A burial was incongruous and wrong during a time of dogwoods and blithe perennials, stories of empty tombs and rolled-away rocks, and frenetic children combing fields full of poorly concealed, brightly dyed eggs, one always golden. With the world being rebirthed all around him, Mason mourned underneath a tent on a mat of artificial grass, holding his child’s hand, occupied by his own concerns, the preacher’s words disintegrating into the air, too frail and slight for the huge outdoors, pulverized by the vault of sky and the hard, ancient mountains. He returned to the grave twice that day, knelt and touched the turned dirt, red clay flecked with mica, trying to make sense of what was happening to him.
Grace was devastated. Gutted. Mason had collected her from school and sat her down in her grandma’s kitchen and slow-walked her into the tragedy, the worst experience in his forty-plus years, bar none. For five nights, he made a pallet and slept on the floor beside her. He allowed her to miss school for two days, doing what he could to answer her questions, comforting her when she cried and indulging her with movies and rich desserts. The child took a stab at making breakfast for her dad the day following the accident, and once he had to hustle after her when she set out with her pink and yellow backpack and a claw hammer, planning to find Lonnie Gammons and put a beating on him. They did the best they could, the both of them staggered.
Gates, meanwhile, remained in the pen, didn’t make the trip to Stuart—he and Mason were still at odds, their communications more and more infrequent and often by letter. “I’ve got enough to put up with,” Mason had told Sadie Grace when she broached the subject of bringing him home for the funeral. “I don’t need that monkey on my back, more to vex me.” To his credit, Gates did call Mason on his own dime—glibly promising to keep his brother in his “thoughts and prayers”—and he had a peace lily dispatched to the funeral home. “I know it’s a bad time to ask,” Gates said before his last pay-phone minutes expired, “but did you have a chance to look over the motion I sent you? I mean, I’m not askin’ you to do it now or anything, that wouldn’t be decent, no it wouldn’t, but just when you get past all this. In the next day or two. I’ve got a deadline.” Mason was so enraged that he went barreling to his office, found the envelope full of ponderous longhand on notebook paper and burned it. He shook the ashes into a box and sealed it, leaving instructions for Sheila to return the package to the penitentiary.
Not long after the service, Mason discovered the lie Custis had told for him, and he immediately wanted the truth to be known, thanked Custis but refused to let him be blamed for something not wholly of his making.
“Why you wanna go and do that?” Custis asked him. They were sitting on the porch at Mason’s. Sadie Grace was inside molding hamburger into a meat loaf, supper for her son and granddaughter. “What good will it do you or Grace or Allison? The fact of the matter is I’m the one who really pushed the issue with the Gammons kid. My case, my call. It’s a wrinkle you shouldn’t have to deal with. You know how people can be.”
“Our case, our call. I’m not going to be a coward and hi
de behind your skirts, Custis, much as I appreciate the gesture. I could’ve stopped it.” He sighed and stared at the pasture, the grass greening and uneven. “Can you believe this? What a damn mess. What an unfair, one-in-a-million, Greek tragedy cluster fuck. The day after her birthday. We were set, too. Perfect with each other—I loved her and she loved me.” He watched a line of ants curving across the porch boards. “But I’ll make sure everyone knows what’s what. I’m as much at fault as you. Hell, more at fault—I’m the boss.”
“Which assumes both of us did somethin’ wrong. In our minds, at least, we have to realize maybe we didn’t, Mason. We didn’t cause this. You could argue we’re no more to blame than Gammons’s driver’s ed teacher or the guy who sets the exam schedule at Tech. For any number of reasons, you don’t have to carry this bag, and you shouldn’t. You couldn’t see around the corner. You damn sure didn’t mean for it to happen.”
Mason dipped his head. He wasn’t looking at Custis when he spoke. “So why’re you scrambling all over the county flogging this lie?” He grinned slightly but didn’t lift his eyes.
“’Cause I knew what you’d think, and I knew it would come up even though it shouldn’t. It’s a tiny bit of aggravation I wanted to take off you.”
Mason looked at his friend but didn’t answer. He proceeded to walk inside and tell Sadie Grace about his involvement, and he called Inez Rucker, Custis’s lady friend. He wrote a letter to the editor, which Gail Harding returned to him unpublished. The community didn’t know precisely what to believe, and ultimately only the most moronic of the jackasses and dolts viewed the collision as anything but a Byzantine fluke, simply horrid bad luck. Still, Custis and Mason both suffered their decision like a millstone, and sometimes when he thought about Lonnie Gammons and the crash at Charlie Martin’s intersection, Mason would curse out loud or bang his fist against a wall or a counter, seething.
After nearly a month, at night he took to sitting on the sofa in her studio, the stuffing pressing through tears and slits, a rough blanket from a Mexican vacation partially covering the cushions. He would gaze at the spot where he last saw her awake and wonder if the rhino was finished, if it would suit her. At dusk one warm evening, his doctor buddy Vince Castillo dropped by to check on him, and he told Vince he was out of whack, felt like he’d become saturated and was sinking, a dreamy, suspended free fall, aimless and soupy, breaking up and dropping at the same time, destined for the muck. Vince gave him a prescription for Valium, but Mason didn’t fill it, couldn’t see where it would change his circumstances.
Chapter Nine
For Mason, loss played to form: he was bewildered, then furious as a wet hen—frustrated and quick-tempered—and finally, depressed, swamped by sadness.
Early on, Sadie Grace spent most of her nights with him and her granddaughter, pitching in with the cooking and the household demands, and friends frequently stopped by to say hello or coax him over for a meal or mention a fishing trip or invite him to a Saturday-evening movie. Midway through June, his old pal Claude arrived unannounced with wild rabbits he’d killed and skinned, and he and Mason visited in the den, telling high school tales and recounting Gates’s antics, marveling at how popular he’d been. “Nobody could charm ’em like your crazy brother,” Claude said. They’d gotten comfortable, the conversation oiled and rolling. “Ol’ Heaven’s Gates. Remember that? How he’d say to the girls, ‘I’d be delighted to let you enter and take you on a tour you’ll never forget.’” Claude laughed and clapped his hands. “What a lady-killer, huh? Always…” He caught himself and took a furtive, self-conscious peek at Mason. “Aw, shit, man. Here I am supposed to be cheerin’ you up and I go and put my foot in my big mouth. My bad.”
Mason shook his head, forced Claude to look at him. “Don’t fret about it. Every reference to a woman or wife won’t cause me to fall apart. I’m not that hopeless, okay?”
But, in truth, he was floundering, and eventually he yielded to his mother’s nudges and encouragement and started attending church regularly, eager to find some solace in religion, some tonic that would set him right. He and Allison had occasionally gone to the Presbyterian church on Staples Avenue, hitting the high spots like Christmas, Mother’s Day and Easter, and they’d sent Grace to Vacation Bible School there, where she learned snippets of scripture and fashioned crafts from Popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners. Mason shopped around a bit, even tried his mother’s True Gospel House of the Risen Lord, an Independent Baptist affair, but the service was too long, too hardscrabble, too strident, too tent-revival, electric-bass theatrical. He finally decided to pin his hopes on the Presbyterians. So, perplexed and sucker punched, seeking a hint as to why his wife had been killed for no discernible reason, he spent the summer in Sunday worship and Wednesday-night Bible studies.
He found the congregation to be generous and sincere, the minister thoughtful, the denomination’s doctrines worthwhile, the charity laudable and the entire enterprise a wrenching waste of his time—before hearing the organ and beholding the stained glass, he already knew sin was wicked, tithes were a necessary burden and his neighbors deserved better treatment and more attention. What he couldn’t discover was why in blue blazes his wife was no longer with him. The sermons and messages were simply not on topic for him, missing his needs with a defiant regularity, and the frequent suggestion that he and the others occupying the pews were not meant to solve the majesty of a grander scheme—the trite fallback “The Lord works in mysterious ways”—seemed like a sophist’s crooked masterpiece, a squishy dodge requiring a much bigger buy-in than he was willing to make. After three months, he felt as if he were an ignored schoolboy, raised high off his seat, his arm shot straight up, straining to catch the teacher’s eye, never called on or acknowledged.
One morning late in September, disturbed by a rocky, sleepless night, he appeared at his preacher’s study, demanding more than the clergyman could give.
“Why did my wife get killed in a car wreck?” Mason asked, agitated and unshaven, having rushed through their pleasantries. Reverend Hunsicker had offered decaf coffee, which Mason declined. It was morning, the air outside brisk but not bitter.
Using his index finger, the preacher slid his reading glasses farther up his nose. “Pardon me?” The men were separated by a desk, alone in a modest basement room, books spilling from cardboard boxes and red plastic milk crates.
“Why is my sweet, talented Allison dead, when the fools and criminals and drunks, the flotsam and jetsam who fill the courtrooms, can’t be killed with a sledgehammer? Why does my daughter not have a mother? How can this be authored—or allowed—by a benevolent God? And if your answer is ‘sometimes we can’t understand His purpose,’ I don’t want to hear it. That’s not an answer, it’s an excuse.”
The preacher looked at him with sympathy, an earnest cast to his features. “I wish I had an explanation, Mason. I do. I don’t think it’s fair either, to use the term generally, as it relates to the here and now. Her death was tragic. Difficult.” He ducked his head, emotional. “But you’ve got to hold fast to your faith. Continue to pray.” His voice was low, on the verge of a whisper. “Continue to humbly petition the Lord and ask for peace of mind. The Lord answers prayers.”
Mason considered what he was about to say. Ran through it silently. A space heater kicked on, humming and glowing orange. “No offense, Reverend, but the whole prayer routine seems like a parlor trick to me, an elegant variation on the Amazing Randi’s act or the Magic Eight Ball game. Let me see if I understand: We’re supposed to pray, but the request only comes to fruition if it’s God’s will, correct? So if we don’t get our cancer cure or new job or marriage saved or rent money or spouse to quit drinking, it wasn’t His will, and we’re okay with the rejection, but we’re still positive we’re blessed by our Almighty. He simply knew better than we did.” Mason hesitated. He gestured with both his hands, tossing them out disgustedly. “And if we win the prayer lotto, well there you go: We sing hymns and give thanks and rejoice, p
raise be, because the Lord delivered a new car or jammed the coffers of the building fund. Who could doubt the connection? Our prayers were answered. It’s a can’t-lose gimmick, a damn shell game—I hate to say it, but it is. I mean, how far are we removed from the days when we bowed to Zeus because we burned a goat and chanted his name and the thunder quit?”
“I understand why you’re so disappointed—”
Mason interrupted. “The prayer thing is a side issue for me anyway; I’ve got a bigger bone to pick. No matter how you cut it, either your God allowed my innocent, undeserving wife to get killed—omnipotent neglect, I guess you’d call it—or He intended for it to happen, and that’s clearly screwed up given the world’s infinitely more deserving choices.” Mason sighed and bit his lip. “This isn’t…” He slouched in his chair. “This isn’t working for me, Reverend. I appreciate your decency, I appreciate the good hearts in this church, I appreciate the fine deeds everyone does for the community, but my wife is dead, and it’s cruel and random and there’s nothing here to change any of those painful facts. No hard feelings, and for what it’s worth, I think you’re a good man. Very considerate. Problem is, your employer needs to do a better job stocking your store—can’t sell what you don’t have.”
Reverend Hunsicker trailed Mason to his car, and he phoned and visited in the weeks that followed, and he listened to Mason’s vehement complaints, absorbed his criticism, struggled to brace Mason’s faith, did all he could to transfer a certitude he possessed but Mason didn’t. Mason, though, had made up his mind, and the preacher’s many efforts and devout entreaties bounced off a man who was too angry to listen and too far gone to care.
