“You don’t think I’m beautiful?”
“What? No. I mean, yes, you’re beautiful. It’s just, old men shouldn’t talk like that to little girls.”
“Well, my Grandpa is an old man and he tells me I’m beautiful.”
“But he’s your Grandpa. It’s okay for your Grandpa to call you beautiful.”
“Mr. Keller is old like my Grandpa.”
“But he’s not your Grandpa, Sweetie. That’s the point. He’s not your Grandpa so he shouldn’t talk to you that way. It’s not right.”
“Jeez, he didn’t mean anything by it.”
Jeez, he didn’t mean anything by it … something else I had heard before.
“Would you like a spot of tea, sir?” Katie offered.
“Why yes, indeed, I would. Thank you, Governor.”
She breaks character for a moment and educates me.
“Okay, first of all, I’m a lady so don’t call me ‘governor.’ Instead, refer to me either as “Miss Kate” or ‘my lady’. Secondly, when you do say ‘governor’, you have to say it like the English do. They say ‘guvner’, like its only two syllables instead of three. Guv. Ner. See what I mean?”
“Yes, my lady. Guvner.”
She clapped approvingly. “Oh, that was quite lovely.”
“Too right!”
It was silly and wonderful to be sipping tea on a summer’s day with Miss Kate. Her mom had let us use her China tea set and we set up a table and chairs in Katie’s bedroom. The tea was bitter and I felt ridiculous in the top hat and cane that she had pulled from the trunk at the end of her bed, but the company was, well, quite lovely.
“I must say, that hat does suit you,” she said. “Very handsome indeed.”
Blood rushed to my face and brought a sweat with it.
“I say! Are you blushing? You are! You are! How sweet! You’re blushing. Is it because I called you handsome?”
I said nothing. Just tried to will the red out of my face.
“Oh, it’s okay. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. You are handsome though. Truly.”
“KATIE! Would you stop it, please!”
She giggled. “I’m sorry. I know how you feel. I did the same thing when Mr. Keller told me I was beautiful.”
“Whadya mean?”
“Yesterday, after he had mowed our lawn my mom had me bring him a glass of lemonade and when I gave it to him he said ‘thanks, beautiful girl’.” She tossed her hair back and raised her chin to the stars as she said it. “I blushed the same way you just did and he laughed at me.”
“Well that’s gross.”
“It most certainly is not!”
“He’s an old man. That’s why we call him Old Man Keller. And old men shouldn’t be calling little girls beautiful unless it’s their granddaughter or something.”
“Jeez, he didn’t mean anything by it.”
I leave my new friend on her swing and walk to the cemetery. I have things to ponder and I do my best pondering while walking. So I trek out there slowly so my suspicions of the Old Man can marinate a little longer.
“Jeez, he didn’t mean anything by it.”
Two little girls had said that to me in my life. One of them ended up dead. Charlie Skinner believed it was someone other than Slim Jim who had killed Katie Cooper.
Could it have been Old Man Keller who killed Katie?
How could I possibly find out so many years later? There is only one way and that’s with the help of the supposed Good Samaritan—Mr. Innocent.
Just like the first time, Mr. Innocent had placed the unaddressed and unsealed white envelope under the rock near James Johnson’s headstone. It had been several days since my return letter and I had all but given up on him, but here I was holding a new letter in my hand. Hopefully, there is more than one word this time.
There is.
You asked me how I know Slim Jim was innocent and I can’t tell you that, sorry. Maybe I am wrong but I don’t think so. I suppose it don’t matter much anyhow, been to long a time. Probably should not even said nothing been so long. Still innocent is innocent and guilty is guilty.
He sounded like a man who was done talking, which pissed me off. In clearing his own conscience, he had weighted mine down. Except I wasn’t going to let him wash his hands of everything quite so easily. I wasn’t going to let him sleep. I wasn’t going to let him get away with whatever the hell it was he was getting away with. Hell, for all I knew Mr. Innocent himself might be the real killer. He sure talked like a man who was guilty of something.
I suppose it don’t matter much anyhow, been too long a time.
Bullshit. Justice always matters. That’s how I’ll start my next letter. Then I’ll tell Mr. Innocent how he has no right to a clear conscience. That he hasn’t earned one. Not yet anyway. I will tell him that if he doesn’t come forward with everything he knows that he is an accomplice to murder.
In my first letter I had been afraid of being too aggressive and scaring him off. That approach had not worked. This time I would attack. This letter would be loaded with threats and questions that required answers or caused insomnia.
How can you live with yourself?
You’re the real killer, aren’t you?
I’m going to find you. It’s just a matter of time.
Your letters are being scanned for fingerprints.
You better come forward before we find out who you are.
The next morning, I awoke before dawn and once again I march like a foot soldier to the Willow Grove cemetery. I have a book to read and another yellow envelope that I will place under the gray rock that rests near James Johnson’s grave. And this time, after delivering my letter, I will lurk.
I will hide in secret for as long as it takes for Mr. Innocent to come out, come out from wherever he is.
I settle into a small space between the evergreen bushes and the utility shed. From here I have a distant but clear sightline to the grave of James Johnson. Any car entering the cemetery will pass directly in front of me and over the first couple hours many did.
Turns out there’s a lot to be learned in lurking.
Sunnier than sunny, and the Widow Simpson is walking around the cemetery with an umbrella. She is using it as a walking cane, but I ain’t buying. I know the dour old crank wants a rainy world. I never used to understand how someone could choose to be so hateful, but I have come to learn. There is a kind of strength that is most easily reached from inside of hate. Makes you feel like you can take on almost anything you might come across.
We always called her the Widow Simpson, even though she’d never been married. Probably never even had a family, we figured. Probably just crawled out of the ground one day and started hating things. Turns out we were wrong. She was here to water flowers at what looked to be her parent’s gravesite.
I guess you never stop needing your mom and dad.
A little while after that, I watched Marylyn Jeffries stand before the grave of the little brother she had lost over fifty years ago and I learned that we never forget and that we live on for each other.
I also learned that the phenomenon of the Grave Letters was still going strong. From friend to friend, from brother to sister, from daughter to mother.
From father to son.
As if in a dream, I watch that shiny black Oldsmobile 442 slow to a stop in front of Ethan’s grave. For a moment, it looks as if Dad isn’t going to get out and I suspect that’s probably an internal debate he is having. But then the engine turns off and the driver’s side door slowly swings open.
Everything Dad does these days is either done slowly or not done at all. Dad has not treated his body well in his fifty-four years and it caught up to him in recent years. A collapsed lung, a heart attack, another collapsed lung. Still, he claims no regrets. If you ask Dad, he’ll tell you that his health issues aren’t the result of smoking, drinking, and the other accoutrements of an undisciplined lifestyle, they are partly genetic and partly environmental.
“Sure,
I know the smoking probably made things than they wouldn’t have been. I’m not a fool. But that’s not why I’ve had the problems I’ve had, Tuck. It’s whatcha call Farmer’s Lung. Plus my Grandpa John always had heart problems.”
Like the autumn and its changing personality, Dad is sometimes refreshingly brisk, sometimes too cold, sometimes surprising in his warmth. Autumn used to be my favorite season, the cool relief from oppressive summer. But then I realized that autumn lacks something that I desperately need in my life—hope. Autumn offers no hope. Of yesterday it teases, of tomorrow it taunts. Leaving you to sweat in recollection and shiver in foreboding. All of its promises are cold, the autumn.
With the aid of a cane I had never seen him use before, he walks to Ethan’s grave and stands in front of the headstone.
I wonder at the man’s thoughts.
And then he begins to cry. The tears come and go like a spring shower. After years of seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder, I had finally felt the rain.
He walks back around to the front of the headstone and clears away some leaves and twigs with his cane. Then he reaches inside his jacket pocket and — to my utter astonishment — pulls out an envelope. Dad lived in a small town a few miles from Willow Grove and apparently they, too, had gotten word of the Grave Letters phenomenon. He bends down and places it under the statue of the weeping angel that looks over Ethan’s grave.
Head bowed, he stands still in front of the headstone for a moment, then coughs hard a couple times and returns to his car.
When he is gone, I walk over and open the letter.
Tucker and Tammy,
They say that everything happens for a reason and I suppose there’s probably some truth to that. I’m sure you’ve been searching for one. I just wanted you to know that if you haven’t found it, you are not alone.
With Love
A Friend
The short letter drains me of all energy and I head back for town. I consider taking the Mr. Innocent letter with me, but decide against it. I will gamble that it will either still be there tomorrow or Mr. Innocent will pick it up and write me back.
Sometimes I feel like I didn’t know my own dad any better than Ethan got to know his. As a young boy, it was my dream to grow up to be like my dad. As a man, I fear that I have done just that. But having children of our own makes it both easier and tougher to love ourselves. Easier when we see the beauty within them, harder when we see our own flaws mirrored back.
Dad’s love for me is Old Testament. It’s the way he knows and I eventually learned to respect it. And maybe now I can learn to actually accept it.
I have spent too much of my life being ashamed of my dad. He smoked, he drank, and he always laughed too loud for me. He cheated on Mom and caught my shame because of it. But in this one short letter I learned more about my father than I had learned in all the conversations we ever had. I knew my dad was a good man. And I knew that he loved me. Because fathers love their sons.
Life, Death, and the Stillness in Between
Then Grandma got sick.
She had been having abdominal pain for a few days before Aunt Paula and Grandpa were finally able to convince her to go to the hospital. When she finally did go, the doctor decided to keep her overnight for observation. When he was unable to diagnose her symptoms, he had her stay another night. And then another. They performed exploratory surgery and still they found nothing.
It was this nothing that would soon kill her.
After surgery, they checked her into what they called a rehabilitation center for one week of rest and recovery. I had never actually been inside a rehabilitation center, but in my mind I had images of stroke victims learning to talk again or amputees getting used to their new prosthetics.
That was not what this place was.
This was a place they put old people they didn’t know what else to do with. This was purgatory. A place for those who were closer to death than to life.
With Grandma away, Grandpa had assumed the breakfast duties. “You know you don’t have to do this, Grandpa,” I say between bites of bacon one morning.
“What’s that?”
“Making these big breakfasts every morning. I usually don’t eat breakfast at all.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. Kind of makes me feel, oh, I don’t know—normal, I guess. Having breakfast is normal.”
I nod. “The bacon’s good.”
“Yep. And everything else is either undercooked or overcooked. I ain’t had much practice at this in the past, oh, say fifty-five years or so.”
I bet fifty-five years looked smaller from his end of it. The frying pan sizzles as Grandpa lays more bacon in it. He keeps his back to me. “Hey, Grandma was telling us the other day how the two of you met.”
“Oh, was she now?” he says as he scrapes runny eggs into the garbage. Then he puts more bacon into the frying pan and turns back around to face me. “And what did she say—that I was an old grouch?” He smiles his grandfather smile and I wonder when that had come to him. It’s not the kind of look a man is born with.
“No, not at all. She said it was a double-date with John and Marge. It was Marge that thought you were an old grouch. Grandma said she thought you were handsome.”
“Well, I suppose they’re both right,” he says with a wink. Grandpa has his back to me again, paying too much attention to the bacon.
“So, what did you think of her?”
“Oh, she was about the prettiest thing I’d ever laid eyes on.” Left hand in his pocket, tongs in his right, he turns the bacon, looking at things I couldn’t see. “Never expected a second date, but I asked her anyway. She said yes and we went for a picnic. This time without that chatterbox Marge.”
A picnic. I could see the red and white checkered blanket, the woven basket, the sandwiches wrapped in white linen.
“We were in a play together, too. She didn’t tell you that, though, did she?”
“No,” she didn’t. “A play? Like a play play?”
“No, of course she didn’t. That was before we ever went out.”
“Wow, a play. I never really pictured you as a thespian, Grandpa.”
“Well, hell, I wasn’t always bald and fat, you know.”
“What play was it?”
“You know, I don’t remember what the play was. I worked backstage anyway—props and stuff, you know—and your Grandma had a small part. The only thing I really remember about any of that is your grandmother. I was two years older but still couldn’t muster the courage to ask her out. But imagine my surprise a year later when my buddy John talks me into going on a double date with him and his gal Marge and that little gal from the community theater shows up.”
“Did she remember you?”
“Oh, heck no. And I didn’t tell her about it either.”
“You didn’t tell her that you remembered her from the play?”
“No, siree Bob. Not that night. Not ever.”
“You never told her?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“I guess maybe after a while of hearing her tell the story of how we met, I didn’t want to make it something other than what it was to her. Seemed like destiny the way she told it.” He puts two more pieces of bacon on my plate. “I never wanted to be anything other than the man she thought she met for the first that night with John and Marge. Now, how’s that bacon?”
I was not the man Tammy had married. I stopped being that man when that man lost his son.
The new me took a leave of absence from work so I could stay home and drink because being drunk helped. When sober, my thoughts were scattered, like a thousand numbered index cards spilled on the floor. And me picking them up one by one, trying to find some sense in the million combinations. I’d replay the night at the hospital with Ethan and feel the tears build. What were Tammy and I doing while our little boy was dying inside of her? What kind of mundane bullshit were we discussing as his heart stopped?
Is that what you’r
e wearing?
What should we have for supper?
Wait till I tell you what Dave in accounting did today.
Whatever it was, I hope we weren’t laughing. I hope he died in our sleep.
One thought always lead to another and to another and there was no end, but the drinking helped. I drank to suppress it all and then—once numb—drank more to let it ease back out of me. Not all at once as it came when I was sober, but little by little and under my control. A turn of the valve. Drink a little, hurt a little, slow down, drink less, feel it coming, drink more, knock it down, drink more, keep it down, drink more, can’t see straight, drink more, vomit, cry, pass out.
I’d get drunk and write poetry. Some of the poetry was ok, a lot of it sucked, all of it helped. The alcohol dulled the pain and allowed me to express it all at the same time. I let the tears flow freely: onto the paper, smearing with the ink and mixing with the words I had written; or into my drink where I could swallow them back into me.
The first poem came after a phone call one night with my old college roommate Chris. He and his wife had a son two weeks prior to our losing Ethan and it was his talking about their baby not sleeping through the night that sparked me. When I hung up the phone, I doused my freshest pain with vodka and let the words flow like water over jagged rock.
Your little boy cries too much.
My little boy makes no sound.
Your little boy sleeps warm in his crib,
Mine lies cold in the ground.
Your little boy woke up today,
My little boy never will.
Your little boy laughs and plays,
My little boy lies still.
Your little boy makes you proud,
And just as proud am I.
Cause while your little boy is learning to walk,
Where the Broken Lie Page 11
