“Exactly.”
I remember thinking, as the tall letters glimmered in the gold and purple dusk, she seemed nervous, unsure of me, the way she responded to my father’s silly puns. She sounded like my grandfather, scolding his flock.
Cassie walks on her hands, along the third-base foul line. “Kelly, catch me if I fall!”
“You got it, kid.” I laugh and step behind her, holding my arms like a loving embrace, ready to encircle her legs if she starts to topple. Watching us, Clay smiles and takes his wife’s hand. Sharon flinches, ever so slightly, then rubs his arm stiffly. My good friends.
Above us all, green and white fireworks unspool like spider webs. Golf clubs thwack in the grass. Tonight, on its “birthday,” as Cassie puts it, America is prosperous, at peace.
Now she wobbles, says, “Oh!,” then pitches forward. I snap shut my arms, but somehow I miss her. I stand there, in the outfield, hugging warm air while she wails at my feet, staring in disbelief at the grass burns on her knees.
Her father comes running, scoops her up with ease. Instantly, she’s giggling.
If I can’t take care of a little girl.
Still gripping his daughter, Clay pats me, reassuringly, on the back. We turn and smile at Sharon.
Shortly after finishing college with a degree in petroleum geology, Dad married my mother, landed a job with an oil company in Dallas, and drove her, with two suitcases and a set of bone china, across the Red River in an old rented Ford.
“All right, good riddance,” Grandfather Darnell told him bitterly the day he left. “Anybody who’d choose to live in Texas hasn’t got the sense God gave a squirrel.”
He’d wanted Dad to become a man of the cloth. He confessed this to me in one of the few conversations we had when I was a child (the men in my family were as notoriously short on words as they were on forgiveness).
“Especially then—the postwar years—I wanted him in the church. America was having a party,” he said. “On top of the world, we were. Money and booze. A housing boom. Terrible.”
“Why was it terrible?” I asked.
It was August. My father and I had driven up from Dallas for a visit. My mother must have been with us, but I don’t remember her being there. She was already pulling away by then.
I was sitting with my grandfather in his backyard garden, late in the afternoon, watering his fat tomatoes. Dad was inside. He’d found an old sketchpad of his in the basement and was thumbing through its pages.
“Why? Because we were in danger of succumbing to the pleasures of the material world, that’s why. We were celebrating, blindly, when what we should have been doing was thanking the Lord for our blessings. More than ever, right then, we needed men of the Word, to keep America on its path to greatness. Do you understand?”
“Mm-hm.” I didn’t.
“But your father never paid me any mind.” He squinted at Dad through a dusty bedroom window. “As a boy, he was constantly daydreaming, your father. Collecting rocks, listening to crickets, drawing pictures.” This was the first I’d known of Dad’s art. “Idle nonsense.”
He leaned over me, then. I felt the heat of his breath. “Don’t ever forget this, son: God demands of all His children a life of full atonement for our sins.”
“What sins?” I said.
With two large fingers, Grandfather Darnell lifted my elbow so water gushing from the hose in my hand would hit the right spot. “The sins of the fathers,” he said. “Someday you’ll have to decide. Are you going to run from the truth like your dad, or are you, perhaps, going to assume my earthly burden and joy?”
I stared at him, wildly confused. My arm was tired. I dropped it a little, splashing mud on the side of his pinewood garage.
He snatched the hose from my hand. “I’m talking about the ministry, Kelly. You’ll know it if you ever hear the Word. You know what I’d like you to do?” He sounded furious. “I’d like you to listen for it. Will you? Listen close, for me. It could come tomorrow. It could come many years from now.”
Right then, the only word that came to me was duffer.
He placed a palm on my head and spoke to the clouds in the sky. “Lord, it would please me so if this boy were to take up my calling.” He inspected me closely—my posture, my nervous smile—as if I were a struggling, sad patch of his garden.
Later that evening, I was in the yard with Dad. At first he said he was getting some air. Then he admitted, “I needed a break from the Old Prophet.” He laughed. He lit a cigarette. “Always on my ass.”
He never said much, but when he talked to me, I think he talked straight.
I asked him about the ministry. For a while he didn’t answer. Then: “I considered it seriously. Atonement. That was the word he used on me, year after year, and it certainly had an effect.”
Crickets whirred beneath lightly stirring, moonlit leaves. Through the house’s open windows, TV laughter.
“Why didn’t you end up preaching?” I asked.
“College.” He bent down, plucked a chalky rock from the soil. “You’ve heard your grandpa talk about God’s Plan, right?”
“Again and again.”
Dad grinned.
From time to time I’d attended Grandfather’s church, a milk-white A-frame near several old farms, south of Lawton, and heard him stress God’s Plan. The days I went, I felt sheepish, climbing its steps dressed in a pressed cotton suit while in the grasshoppery fields all around us, men grunted and sweated over tractors. Grandfather Darnell said they’d never make it into Heaven, putting work ahead of the Lord. “Indigent souls,” he called them.
“Well, in college, I learned how these suckers are formed,” Dad said. He dropped the rock in my palm. “I learned about the fire in Earth’s belly. And I couldn’t believe any more.”
“In God?”
The TV roared.
“God. Atonement. The whole shebang.” He squeezed his hand over mine, around the rock. “There now. Feel that? What does it tell you?”
“I don’t know.” I rubbed the grainy edges.
“Feel any Plan?”
“No.”
“Anything at all?”
I guess not.
He took the rock from me. “Accident,” he said, waving it. “That’s all. Sometimes, in life, it’s a blessing. Most times it’s not.” Ashes dribbled from his Camel onto the grass. He tossed the rock over a low wire fence, into the alley. “Ah well. End of sermon. Sorry about that. I guess I’m my daddy’s son after all.”
“Ah well,” I echoed.
“We’d better get back inside or he’ll think we’re out here sneaking smokes.” He laughed and shook my shoulder.
On that same trip, I asked him to show me where the theater used to be. The place he’d burned to the ground. We were walking downtown with Grandfather Darnell, past a Rexall Drug Store, a bowling alley, and a beauty parlor. “I don’t remember, exactly,” he said, scratching his head, walking quickly. “I think it was near the end of the block here.”
Grandfather Darnell broke away from us and went to stand in a vacant lot, up to his knees in sticker burrs. “Here,” he said. “Or there.” He pointed across the street to another empty field. “It doesn’t really matter. Many of the old buildings along this street are gone now, but if you concentrate hard, the Lord will help you feel the pain of those who suffered here.” He shut his eyes. “Can you feel it?”
Dad stared at him with what clearly was dismay.
“Who?” I said. “Who suffered here?”
“Indigent souls. From the poorhouse up near Lawton. From the farms when they failed in the dust and the wind. In the winter’s bitter cold, all the lost sheep would flock into town, along Main Street here, looking for a place to spend the night, to get warm. War veterans, Indians, Old Lady Jones—”
“That’s enough,” Dad said.
“Who’s Old Lady Jones?” I asked.
“Enough gloomy talk. This was a booming little town after the war,” Dad said. “Folks had it goo
d here.”
“Not all folks,” Grandfather said. “I tried to help your mother’s family get established here. Did you know that?” he asked me. “Good businessman, your mother’s father. Long before the fifties, I was after him to open up a store here, to boost our local economy. The picture wasn’t quite as lovely as your dad makes it sound. A lot of the buildings here were already old then. Rickety, unsafe. Like the theater—”
“Okay. Really. That’s enough,” Dad said.
“If we’d had a Duffy’s back then, it could have started an economic renaissance here, and we’d all have been better off.” He patted my head. “A minister has to look after his flock, not just with prayer, Kelly, but with an eye on the world as well. Sadly, the city fathers didn’t see things my way. Not for the longest time.”
Dad looked at Grandfather, and I thought I saw in his pained, tightly drawn lips the frightened young man he must have been the night he lost his watch in the blaze. “Goes with the territory,” he said quietly. “Fathers. Not seeing things.”
Dad liked his work in Dallas and he made a decent living. He bought a nice house for us, hit the links every Saturday and Sunday. The old scar on his arm—parchment-brown now, scrunchy as tinfoil—glowed whenever he wore his pastel golf shirts.
My mother still worked part-time as a nurse in an obstetrics clinic, counseling pregnant women, a job she didn’t need but enjoyed; once each month, she flew to Oklahoma City to help her family with inventories and other Duffy’s matters.
Besides playing golf, my father spent his free time painting. After finding the old sketchpad in his father’s basement, he’d come home and converted the guest bedroom into a studio. He built his own easel, arrayed tubes of Winsor & Newton oils on a ratty old card table. On the walls he hung photos torn from Life and Look and The Saturday Evening Post, interiors he might want to paint someday. Books on graphic design, theater set painting, and most interesting to me, because they were big and glossy and full of pretty girls, art design for the motion-picture industry cluttered his desk, along with rocks of every “accidental” shape, which he used as paperweights.
That room, I see now, was his sacred space, his escape from the chancy, combustible world. He’d stay in it for hours, in full control of his materials, and he wouldn’t say a word. This drove my mother batty. She was an active woman, from a family of movers and shakers. Even as a girl, she’d attended balls, political rallies. I used to hear her stories about them. Now, she zipped around Dallas in a sporty little Mustang, from the League of Women Voters to the Old Homes Preservation Society to various garden clubs and high-profile charity meetings.
She complained, often and loudly, that Dad never accompanied her anywhere, never took an interest in her civic concerns. When her appeals to his conscience didn’t work, she railed against his art. “Every damn weekend, Ray, it’s this cluttery old room—”
“Honey, I don’t know what to say to your hoity-toity friends.”
“For God’s sake, you’re a grown man. It’s time you lost a little of that diffidence, don’t you think?”
“It’s easy for you. You grew up with rich folks.” He’d make a pun on a senator’s name—“Gridlock” for Griffin, something like that, hoping to laugh off her anger.
After the worst of these fights—and they deepened, decayed in tone and effect, over time—I’d sit in my room down the hall, listening to my mother dress while my father adjusted his easel. Sometimes his “curse of an arm,” as he called it, stiffened up on him or cramped, as it did on the golf course, but the moments always passed and didn’t affect his work.
I think he had genuine talent, but he never composed his own images; he copied pictures from the magazines onto his canvases, apparently lacking confidence to shape his own world.
“I know what this is about,” my mother told him one night after a particularly nasty quarrel between them. “Drawing and painting again. Don’t think I don’t know.”
My father tried to make a joke, some kind of wordplay—I don’t remember. My mother stood in the hallway in her slip. “If you want to stir up your old misery, that’s your business, Ray, but don’t expect any sympathy from me, you hear?”
He tried to hug her. I was watching from the doorway of my room. Brightred paint like crackling flames smudged his fingers. They slid around her hips. “Don’t touch me!” she yelled, pulling at her straps. “You’ll ruin it, Ray!”
“Of course, your mother’s right,” he confided to me one day in that little back room. I was fourteen or fifteen. Mom had left for Oklahoma City. It was a hot, early fall afternoon, flies batting the screen of the room’s open window, a sprinkler sighing in the still-springy yard. Dad’s silver Cutlass gleamed in the drive.
On a shelf behind his easel a transistor radio screamed, “Ten, five—touchdown! Touchdown! The Fighting Irish have taken the lead!” He always listened to football or baseball while he worked. He knew batting averages, pitchers’ ERAs; concentrating on cold, hard facts, he told me, freed the rest of his mind to wander with the paint.
That day, his shirt, pale red, smelled of turpentine. He lit a cigarette.
“Right about what?” I said.
“Hm?” Inspecting his canvas again, he’d forgotten I was even in the room.
“You said Mom was—”
“Oh. Right about me.”
“How?”
“I am jealous of their assets. Her family, I mean.”
With a palette knife, I picked at a dried medallion of ocher on one of his tabletops. “We’ve got money,” I said. “Don’t we?”
He laughed. “Oh, we’re getting by. We’re getting by just fine. It’s not that.” He plopped a wet brush into a little jar of Liquin. “It’s … their behavior, I guess, their attitude, a way of approaching life. I don’t know. A kind of arrogance. I don’t like it—especially when they turn it on me—but you have to admire it. They know how to get what they want.”
His paintings darkened in spinning shadows from the front-yard trees, rigid in their strict geometry. “Confidence, you mean? Ease? What Mom’s always saying?”
“Yes, I guess that’s it. Whatever it is, I don’t have it, and she’s not going to—” He shrugged. “Ah, hell. I think I was exotic, something different for her at first. A charity case, maybe. Lord knows she loves her charities.” He wiped his hands on a rag. “Till she gets bored with them.”
His face seemed to vanish. He turned from me, back to his work. Afterwards, I was aware of the Kellys’ contempt for him in ways I hadn’t noticed before.
That year my mother’s father bought a summer cabin for us on the Illinois River in northeast Oklahoma. We went there on fishing trips, sometimes with Mom’s folks and her sisters. They never spoke directly to my dad. Her father bragged about his annual profits, his parties and social affairs, his “friends in high places” (he joked that he “owned” Oklahoma’s governor, that he’d bought every cleric in the state—“Get ’em where their faith lies, that’s the bottom line”).
Whenever my father tried to say something, the Kellys looked away from him, as though they couldn’t bear to watch this commoner with his dingy old arm. A gaggle, Mom’s sisters. Noisy, indistinguishable to me, even now.
In the city, on those rare occasions when he’d visit a Duffy’s store—when nothing else was open, say—Dad paid cash. I remember Grandfather Darnell ordering the kindly clerks to “charge it,” but Dad didn’t seem to have an account with the chain. Once, he didn’t have enough money in his pocket to purchase the oil paints he was after. I asked him why he didn’t just write them a check, but he shook his head, certain they’d refuse to accept it.
“But this is Mom’s store!” I said.
“Right,” he said. “Mom’s. Not mine.”
One afternoon, I ran into Cassie and Sharon in a Safeway. They were shopping for candy. Sharon and I talked for a long time until Cassie became exasperated, wanting her gumdrops. “You two act like you’re married whenever you’re together,” she tol
d us, rolling her eyes.
Tonight, as the fireworks unravel just beneath the clouds, Cassie, delighted, wriggles in her daddy’s lap, then Sharon’s, then mine. She closes her eyes and pretends to be a blind girl, feeling the features of each of our faces, misidentifying us on purpose, and laughing. Her fingers brush Sharon’s mouth, then reach up to tap my lips. “This is Mommy and Daddy,” she says, then she finds our hands and brings them together.
Clay smiles, awkwardly. “Watch the fireworks, baby,” he says. “Ooh, there’s a pretty one!”
“I’m bored.” Eyes wide open now, she stands and grabs my hand. “Let’s play ‘Mercy.’”
“How do you play?” I ask.
“I hold your hand and twist your arm until it hurts too much and you say, ‘Mercy.’ Then you do it to me. Whoever goes the longest, wins.”
“That’s not a very nice game, honey,” says Clay.
“Yes it is.”
“Come sit on Daddy’s lap and watch the fireworks. I’ve got some gummy bears in the bag over here.”
“I don’t want to!”
“Sweetie—”
“No!”
She collapses, sobbing, against my chest. I hold her and rock her gently. Clay looks alarmed. Watching him, Sharon’s eyes fill with tears. “Bathroom,” she mutters, standing, shaking, brushing grass from her knees. “I’ll be right back.” Quickly, she walks away, leaving us silent, behind home plate. Cassie twists my arm.
The day came when Mom didn’t return from Oklahoma City. She called to tell him, “Ray, I don’t want to be married any more. I’m going to stay here and help with the stores.”
I’d just turned seventeen; we all agreed I’d stay with Dad in Dallas, to finish high school.
Neither of my folks offered me a reason for their split except “irreconcilable differences.” I knew it meant, “Don’t ask any more questions.”
“Why’d you marry him in the first place?” I asked my mother, testily, on the phone one day.
“I loved your father—”
“But he wasn’t rich enough for you?”
“Kelly, that’s enough out of you,” she said, and we didn’t call each other for a while after that. She sent me a little money each month, suggesting I put it aside for college, and left me her Mustang to drive.
It Takes a Worried Man Page 14
