Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  “We should talk more often,” he said. “Not just when our lives are falling apart at the seams. Come duck hunting with me in the fall.”

  “Only if you’ll read the complete works of Edmund Spenser aloud first.”

  “Who the hell is Edmund Spenser?”

  “The only poet I hate.”

  “Skip the ducks,” he said with a laugh. “I’ll come see you. Maureen has always wanted to see Maine.”

  I told him they would be welcome and not the least bit disappointed.

  —

  We spent another day roaming around Greater Hinton. We hiked through Red Rocks and drove over to see the Kiowa Tribal Museum at Carnegie. A routine of sorts developed: I would call Jerry and, coughing a little, he would inform me that the wait would be just a bit longer, nothing to worry about, a part was still en route. He sounded vague, strained, even a touch agitated, and I’ll admit wondering if he knew what he was doing. My faith began to waver. Was Sam right? I’d hoped we might swing down through Dallas and then along the Gulf Coast, where my father had briefly owned a newspaper when I was three and four. That sentimental route was out of the picture now and it would be a close shave, in fact, just to make it home for Jack’s birthday. Maggie started second grade in exactly one week’s time.

  So much of our lives is spent waiting—for someone to finish a job or make a decision, for something to begin or end, a season to come or go, someone to be born or pass away. My truck was dead but a stranger assured me it would be reborn. The summer was over and school was beginning. The fish weren’t biting but the evenings had a hint of autumn’s coming refreshment in them. Sitting on the edge of my bed at the Hinton Motel, at loose ends, wondering when and if we’d ever get rolling again, I picked up Maggie’s Magic Eightball from her Medicine Bag, gave it a shake, and consulted it for an answer.

  I turned it over and the white-lettered answer floated into focus: Don’t bet on it, it said. I put the Eightball down, thought a moment, then decided to give the durn thing a second chance, turning it over once again. Home is where the heart is, it sappily informed me. A silly child’s toy, I thought, setting it down again. To be on the safe side, I picked up the ph one and dialed the airlines and found out what flew from Oklahoma City.

  On the evening of our third full day in Hinton, there was a sensational barn fire at the edge of town. Fire trucks from several towns whooped past the motel, followed by police cars and speeding pickups. We joined the caravan in the Ronniemobile to the edge of town, where a crowd of a couple hundred people had gathered to watch flames leap from the metal warehouse and smoke wreathe across the flat soybean fields. Several people asked us how we were enjoying Hinton and I eventually found myself standing by the woman whose cousin Nora nearly bought our car. It was now beginning to feel like our car.

  She was holding a paper sack of vine-picked tomatoes and gave me a couple of the meaty monsters. I ate one of them on the spot. It was sweet and delicious and I told her as much.

  “Reckon so. They’re grown from heirloom seeds,” she declared. “Here, hold out your hand.” She reached in her pocket and brought out a folded packet of dried black seeds, explaining she was planning to start a new crop of tomatoes and move them indoors before first frost. She insisted I take a few seeds, which I did, placing them in my breast pocket. I told her maybe I’d try and grow them indoors in Maine and she threw back her tautly curled head and cackled again. “I tell you what, that blame car’ll get your butt chased out of Maine if you take it home.”

  “Or elected governor,” I said, and we both laughed.

  We returned to the motel in full darkness, smelling of hay smoke, and I agreed to watch one of Maggie’s favorite movies with her, Steve Martin’s Father of the Bride. I’d seen this syrupy remake of the Spencer Tracy classic several times with my daughter but the part where the bumbling père realizes his little girl has finally grown up and is about to fly the coop for good and is ineptly trying to get through the wedding crowd to kiss his daughter good-bye—well, that scene never fails to nail me. A lump rises in my throat, my eyes embarrassingly begin to leak.

  I was at precisely this moment in the film, eating my second heirloom tomato, when a knock came at the door.

  I opened the door, wiping tears from my eyes. It was Jerry the mechanic, wiping grease from his hands. He looked positively triumphant. “By durn, she’s done,” he proclaimed, waving a hand at my rumbling truck. “Runnin’ like a dream, too.”

  He probably thought I had tears of gratitude in my eyes, and maybe I did. Old Blue did sound different, as if her next stop might be the inside lane at the local drag strip. But more important, she was a-runnin’ like a dream. I drove Jerry back to his garage and shook his hand. I asked him if there was anything I needed to know about the impressive transplant.

  “Only that the wheels will fall off before that engine quits,” he explained by way of fare-thee-well.

  And so, several hours later, on the morning of the fourth day, we rose again and rolled out of town under the cover of morning darkness, reinvented if not reborn. To be honest, I was suddenly sort of sorry to see Hinton vanish in my rearview mirrors. What a nice place, I thought, a town birds made green again with trees. I sort of wished I could have gathered the whole place together and waved good-bye to the town where everybody still waved. In one of those flash insights that come only when you least expect it, I realized that I’d enjoyed being a prisoner in Hinton—one of the best moments of a fishing trip where I never even fished.

  It was just over an hour’s drive to Oklahoma City and we reached the chain-link fence at the bomb site just about the time the sun was coming up. The sense of the missing building was almost physically overwhelming. The eerie orange sodium security lights were just stuttering off and I saw a police cruiser slide by and noticed that people were already out. It would be another fiercely hot rainless day in Oklahoma and as we drove slowly by the fence where family members and strangers had left hundreds of notes and flowers and teddy bears attached to the metal crosshatch, I couldn’t help wondering what kind of world my children would inherit.

  I pulled over and stopped the engine and asked Maggie if she wanted to get out and go up to the fence and read some of the messages.

  She sat up slowly, blinking in the grayish light. She’d been sleeping and I’d awakened her. I couldn’t tell if she was sad or simply wanted to sleep some more, but after a few moments she shook her head and laid it back down on the pillow. I sat for a moment watching a few early risers walk along the memorial fence. Amos watched them, too. Then I cranked Old Blue and we headed for the interstate.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  South of Sorrow

  WE REACHED MY mother’s just after sundown two days later. She stood on the lighted porch holding the door open with one arm, her waist with the other. The crickets were singing. “I was getting so worried about you two. Goodness’ sakes. Where on earth have you been?”

  She wasn’t really mad, just a little worried, proving I come by it honestly. I kissed her and apologized for making us later than expected, explaining we’d lost a couple hours nosing around Florence, South Carolina, the small town where we’d lived for a year and a half when I turned six and started school. It was only a little out of our way and Maggie, I explained, had been anxious to see the town and hear my memories of it. To tell the truth, I’d been mildly curious to see the place, too, because I hadn’t been back since we left. That was going on forty years. So much had happened to our family that year. She nodded as if she fully understood, then turned to Maggie and declared, “Well, sugar pie, did you leave any trout for anybody else to catch?”

  Maggie beamed at her and managed a toothy “Yes, ma’am. But I caught more fish than Dad.”

  “True. The kid is a regular prodigy. She did some pretty serious injury to the nation’s Gatorade inventory and supply of hot dogs, too.” Call me a son of the old South, but I was glad my daughter had remembered to use “ma’am.”

  We follo
wed her into the kitchen. Supper was waiting on the stove. Molly, my father’s yellow Lab, had been asleep there and suddenly got up and growled furiously at Amos and then, wildly thumping her tail, fell into treating him like her long-lost beau. My mother had made sugar beans and a Yankee-style pot roast, and after we’d washed and begun dishing up, Maggie started chattering about seeing my first school and the Purvis place and the newspaper where her grandfather worked and then slipped into a broader rapid-fire travel narrative about Colorado Trails and the Snake River trip and her old man the Eagle Scout falling out of Norumbega Girl. Hinton earned star billing, as did Amos’s touching the buffalo, the bikers at Rushmore, Cody Rodeo Night, Luke the horse, almost meeting the president, Chaco Canyon, and going to the Frogtown Festival with my friends in Minnesota. Funny what her brain had processed as highlights. She didn’t mention trout more than once—the cute little pencil trout she caught on the Snake.

  My mother glanced at me. She was charmed. She lived alone with Molly, volunteered at the church soup kitchen, gardened, and went to early movies with her widow friends. I suspected she missed my father desperately. I sometimes felt guilty for living so far from her but something I couldn’t quite name foreclosed my return to the South. I’d told her almost nothing about my unraveling married life, just that we’d been working on a few things like all couples who’d been married as long as we had. She loved my wife and I knew she sometimes conveyed the impression to her widow friends that we lived an idyllic existence on our little hill near the ocean in Maine.

  Afterward, while Maggie was having a shower before bed, we sat in the living room with the lights low and glasses of wine. She asked me again how the fishing was out West and I said it was simply fantastic, better than I could have imagined, and I couldn’t wait to go back to the San Juan with a load of Liberace flies and my camera.

  She smiled; the language lost her a bit.

  “Is that a town?”

  “No, ma’am. A river where the trout have advanced degrees in philosophy.” At least I remembered to say “ma’am,” too.

  “What made you go to Florence?” she asked mildly, shifting the conversation.

  I explained that it was just off the interstate and Maggie seemed fascinated by the idea that I’d been her age almost exactly the year we lived there. It was clear, I said, as we pushed hard through the heart of Dixie from Memphis to Birmingham, and then on to Atlanta and toward Columbia, that the landscape and culture of the rural South interested her. We’d sung gospel hymns with the radio, listened to the “obituary of the air,” stopped for late peaches and boiled peanuts and nearly purchased a huge purple martin house, and stopped to gas up in several towns with decaying mansions and sleepy courthouse squares that made Maggie think of the movie Forrest Gump.

  I smiled and swirled the wine around in my glass.

  “She couldn’t believe people would build a whole town to look like something in a movie, as if Hollywood made it up.”

  “It’s good she saw it then. I think that South is disappearing pretty fast.”

  I nodded and admitted I wasn’t particularly nostalgic about it or sorry to see that South go. In my mind a feeling of heat and sadness seemed to hover about these towns. Maybe that’s why I had avoided going back to Florence all these years, I said.

  “But I thought you loved living there.”

  “I did. But I guess I associate sudden change with it—the way things ended, the way we left. It was like the entire world changed overnight.”

  “A lot did happen at once,” she agreed, taking a slower drink of her wine. “I suppose you mean Melvin Purvis and all that.”

  I nodded. Amos wandered into the living room and stretched out on her Oriental rug to sleep. Molly lay down a few feet away, watching him.

  Curiously, Florence had seemed like a small paradise to my brother and me. We lived in a brick house whose large backyard ended by the honeysuckle hedge of a large estate owned by a famous man named Melvin Purvis. We had a “colored” maid named Louise who came every day and ironed clothes, made our lunches, and taught my brother and me to “feet-dance.” She would place our feet on hers and dance us around the linoleum of the kitchen to a song on the radio by the McGuire Sisters. This was “feet-dancing.” I remembered how the distilled water sloshed back and forth in the Coke bottle Louise used to sprinkle our clothes before she ironed them and how she and our mother would stand together in the kitchen talking quietly while my brother and I were supposedly taking naps. My mother was a newcomer to town; she looked like a young Lee Remick. Louise had worked for several of the prominent families in Florence.

  I lay on the bed, listening to their quiet voices but just unable to make out the words, staring at my bare feet, wondering if I could actually see them grow, wearing only shorts and a cotton shirt with horizontal stripes, feeling the intense heat on the yard out the screened window, wondering too how I might finally catch a glimpse of Melvin Purvis the famous G-man. My brother told me Purvis was the most famous man in the world and I had no doubt whatsoever this was true. Purvis was the FBI man who shot and killed John Dillinger, Public Enemy Number One, the legendary lawman who ended the careers of Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson and a host of other famous gangsters of the 1930s. He had three sons, all considerably older than my brother and me, including one who could be seen driving a small red pony wagon around the family estate. How I longed to know that boy. How I hungered to ride in his red pony wagon.

  “I remember how you two talked of nothing else. It was Melvin Purvis this, Melvin Purvis that.”

  “We were sons of a newspaperman.”

  “That’s true.”

  Our father was the paper’s director of advertising and we often rode our bikes downtown to his office, stopping at the Piggly Wiggly on Cherokee Road to get cold drinks and enjoy the air-conditioning. The Piggly Wiggly and the newspaper were the only air-conditioned buildings in town at that time. “Come on in,” a sign in the store’s window read. “It’s cool inside.” We were mesmerized by a reporter at the paper who could do amazing tricks. His name was Burt. Burt could make coins appear from our ears and make his finger appear to come off.

  “Something I always meant to ask you,” I said to my mother. “How exactly did we end up in Florence? I know why, I just don’t know how.”

  She thought a moment. “Well, as I recall, one of your father’s friends from his days at the Washington Post knew about it. After what happened in Mississippi, Florence was like a resting place for us.”

  “But you were never really comfortable there….”

  “Well, it wasn’t home. You’re never happy until you find a place that feels like home.”

  What happened in Mississippi was this: My father had started his own newspaper with a wealthy investor who turned out to be a crook. While my father was away in Tampa purchasing a web press, his partner cleaned out the company accounts and left town. The paper had been running for a year. My father came home and emptied his own personal bank account to pay his six employees a final check. His life’s dream had just gone down the drain. He’d lost everything. He shut off the lights, handed the keys to the custodian, and walked across the street to the courthouse to smoke a cigarette and make a few phone calls. He was thirty-nine years old and calmly told me this story in full when he was eighty. A few days after the paper folded, a phone call from my uncle Jim came, reporting that my father’s mother had taken a nasty fall up in Annapolis. A couple hours later, my uncle Bob phoned with the terrible news that their only sister, Irene, the aunt I had no memory of ever meeting, had been killed instantly in a head-on collision. All of this happened within a week. My mother had just come home from the Gulfport hospital. She’d had a miscarriage.

  “That must have felt like the end of the world,” I said to my mother, wondering, not for the first time, how I would have coped with such an avalanche of bad news. Death, bankruptcy, and a miscarriage all within days—almost hours—of each other.

  “You know,�
� she said, looking at her half-full wineglass, “I had a lot of faith in your father. It was a difficult moment for us, one of those times as a couple you know you’ll either get through together or fly apart. He must have been going out of his mind, but he never conveyed any of that to me. There was never a sense of panic with him. He said things would be all right and they eventually were. That’s the way life happens, sweetie. Good times don’t last but neither do the bad times. Florence wasn’t home but it wasn’t a bad place to rest for a spell.”

  Perhaps I’d lived in the North for too long. My mother’s choice of words—“to rest for a spell”—sounded so southern to me now, an echo of my lost childhood.

  “And, naturally,” she added, “he did well.”

  I knew this. He doubled the paper’s ad lineage within a year, was named to the Southern Newspaper Executives board of directors, started fielding better job offers. Meanwhile, I was doing my dead-level best to catch a glimpse of G-man Melvin Purvis. Maggie and I had just seen his house—a handsome redbrick home with a wide porch and tall white columns that faintly resembled Jefferson’s Monticello, approached by a long sandy drive framed by massive magnolia trees. The place was astonishingly beautiful, as I remembered it, and hadn’t changed much, it seemed, in forty years, I told my mother, except it was now owned by a man who imported wine. His name was Charles Ducker. He’d been a kid in Florence, too, though I hadn’t known him or maybe simply had forgotten him, and he was perhaps even more obsessed with Purvis than I was. We’d visited with him for half an hour and he talked about a day both of us remembered like it was yesterday.

  It had just snowed in Florence. Snow was a rare event in that part of the South and we’d taken a tea tray off the wall and walked over to the country club golf course with Louise to go sledding. Louise said snow in the South was a rare thing and meant something important was going to happen. I thought she meant something in the newspapers. I’d just begun reading and Louise would sometimes read the paper to us. There were protests in southern cities and someone had burned a cross in the Florence High School yard out on TV Road. An airplane had crashed, killing all thirty-eight people aboard. The largest steel strike in American history was ending and my father’s boss had asked me if I knew what “NAACP” really stood for. When I shook my head, he smiled and said, Negroes aren’t acting like colored people, and then laughed. I told this to my mother and she looked unamused and told me some people ought to know better and not to repeat a joke that was in such poor taste but I wasn’t sure why it was a joke or what “poor taste” meant so I repeated it to Louise on the way to the golf course and she didn’t smile, either, but just shook her head slowly as we walked along.