Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  Roseann stared at the spot high on the wall and Bright could see a flush of color in her cheeks. But she didn’t speak.

  “Will you talk to me about it?”

  A shake of the head.

  “Well, I’ll sit here until you do. We have some things to settle.”

  Roseann turned on her then, eyes flashing. “Settle? That has a nice neat sound to it, doesn’t it! I don’t want to settle anything with you!”

  “That won’t do, Roseann,” Bright said calmly. “I’m not going to let you off the hook. Or me.”

  Roseann gave an angry shake of her head, grabbed a handful of the sheet and crushed it fiercely against her breasts. “Damn you!” she cried. “You slap me in the face and then run off with my child, and now it’s me who’s feeling wretched!” She began to sob, rocking back and forth in the bed. “You always make me feel like a bad little girl!”

  Oh, you were! The question is, Did I love you in spite of it? “I’ve thought a lot about that the past few days,” Bright said.

  “I’ve been thinking about it all my life,” Roseann wailed. Then her hands went to her hair and Bright flinched, seeing how hatefully she tugged and pulled, fingers entwined in the brown strands, clawing at herself.

  “Roseann, please,” she said softly. “Please don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t…” Ah, but what? Punish yourself? Punish me? What is it here? What has it always been? Why can’t we . . . TALK! Instead of clawing at each other. And ourselves. “Put your hands in your lap,” Bright said finally, imploring.

  Roseann stared at her, then at her hands. And then she wiped her eyes with them and folded them slowly into the sheet and squeezed her eyes shut. They sat there for a long time in the silence of the room. It, and they, seemed to be carved into neat lines by the shafts of light from the window blinds. A prison cell of sorts, or a confessional box. Just the two of them now. Bright could not remember when it had been just the two of them with no escape and no place to hide. In truth, either or both could cut and run, flee down the tiled corridor of the hospital and out into the blazing day. But they would not. It was time …

  “I don’t think I ever told you much about my own mother,” Bright said after a while. There was no answer from Roseann, no evidence of the slightest interest. “She left when I was nine years old. She got on the train and went to New Orleans and I never heard from her again. I hated her for that. I felt alone and abandoned, and I blamed it all on my mother.”

  Roseann opened her eyes now, looked at Bright.

  “But I’m not quite so sure anymore,” Bright went on. “I’m afraid it’s a good deal more complicated than that. I can’t explain it yet, to myself or anyone else. But I’m beginning to see how it must have been for her. And how others bear blame. I think she felt very much alone, too. And that was a terrible thing.”

  “I know,” Roseann said quietly.

  “You do?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes were bleak with an ancient despair. “I know what it’s like to be alone. That’s the way I always felt with you.”

  It stung her. And it took her a moment to recover. “Why did you feel alone, Roseann?”

  “Because you …” Roseann’s voice broke again and she struggled for a moment to get it under control. Then she shook her head fiercely. “You were always so right about everything! So perfect! So busy! And Papa was never there to make it better!”

  Ah, yes. I can see now how it must have been, how intimidating I must have been. Like Dorsey Bascombe. I am indeed my father’s daughter in ways neither of us ever intended. And we were ever at odds—Roseann so filled with spite, so combative, so belligerent; and me, determined to make the course I chose the right one.

  “I never intended for you to feel alone,” Bright said. “In fact, that was the whole idea behind staying here, not going to Washington. I wanted you and Fitz to grow up here among the people you knew, the people who cared about you.”

  “But we weren’t a family,” Roseann said bitterly.

  “Not in the best sense of the word,” Bright said. “But we stayed together. Even through some times when we might not have. Your father and I made choices, compromises. We both did the best we knew how to do at the time. And now I’m left to live with the consequences.”

  “Yes,” Roseann said, “and so am I.”

  And that too was true. Again, things come full circle. So much of the past skewing the present, defining the future. Beautiful, frightened Elise in a soft summer dress, smiling dreamily at the ladies of the Study Club and then quietly just going away. It had been ever thus. A going away. A train disappearing into the distance, a crumpled telegram. Then beyond that, Dorsey, in whom Bright invested everything once Elise had gone. He too had abandoned her in his own way. And Fitzhugh? Was that a kind of abandonment? Yes, on both their parts. A failure to hold on in the truest sense.

  But there was something else too. Roseann had uttered a great wisdom just now without realizing it. The burden of it was not Bright’s alone. There were three of them left, keepers of the legacy, bad and good. She and Roseann and Fitz. They were the survivors, however scarred, and there might be something worth reaching for there. If it were not too late, if they could each find a little grace.

  So Bright climbed up from the well of memory and looked up into her daughter’s eyes. “I know you missed your father terribly,” she said. “We both share the blame for that.”

  Roseann looked away, out the window at the morning. “I always dreamed that you would die first and Papa would come to live with me. Or I’d come back home and live with him and take care of him when he got old. But,” she whispered, “it didn’t work out that way.”

  Ah, does anything truly ever work out? Or does it just happen, and if it happens the way we wish, we say it worked out. If not … “And I always thought that one day your father would come home and we would put our lives back together. And that didn’t work out either. I grieve for that.”

  Roseann looked back at Bright now and there was the old stubbornness there. And most painful of all, dismissal. “I hope you do,” she said. “And now I just want to get out of here and take my family and go home.” She fixed Bright with her hard eyes, unflinching. “I want you to leave me alone, Mama. Me and Jimbo and Rupert. Just leave us alone.”

  “No,” Bright said, “I won’t do that.”

  “I’m not coming down here anymore,” Roseann flashed.

  Bright stood, smoothing the front of her dress, tucking her purse under her arm. “All right. I’ve discovered that my old car will make it to the capital. I’m sure it will get to your place.”

  “Don’t bother,” Roseann said.

  Bright started to retort, but then she thought, There has been enough said for the moment. I cannot explain it all, or make it all right, because I only understand it dimly myself. What we need now is time. Perhaps there is something beyond time. Or perhaps not.

  Monkey Deloach was standing in the hallway outside Roseann’s room. Bright closed the door and stood there staring at him for a moment.

  “How is … hmmmmmmm … Roseann?” Monkey asked.

  “She’ll be all right,” Bright said. “Just a little too much excitement. We’ve all had a little too much excitement.”

  “Xuripha used to think Donald … hmmmmmm … should have married her,” Monkey said. “But I … hmmmmmm … thought she was too … hmmmmmm … much for him.” He smiled.

  “Well,” Bright nodded, “Xuripha’s not right about everything.”

  “But … hmmmmmm … most things.”

  She looked Monkey over head to toe, thinking again of the small boy who had come to her aid on a wintry playground so many years before, the one she had kissed on the cheek. Good, true, loyal Monkey. There was an abiding sadness about him now.

  “Monkey,” she said suddenly, “go back to the lumberyard.”

  He studied her for a moment. “But I turned all that over to Donald.”

  “Fine. Let D
onald run it. But go back. Do something. Chop down trees. Drive a truck. Get in the way.”

  “But Xuripha—“

  “As I said, Xuripha is not right about everything,” Bright interrupted. “You are too young to go to seed.”

  Monkey looked down at the linoleum of the hallway. “You … hmmmmmm … think that’s what I’m doing?”

  “Yes. And so am I. Or have been, that is.”

  Monkey looked up at her again. “You can’t … hmmmmmm … teach an old dog new tricks,” he said.

  “No, but old dogs know some old tricks the young’uns have never thought of.”

  Monkey ruminated on that. Then a small, sly smile crept across his face. He drew himself up, threw back his shoulders. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, as clearly as you please.

  Bright leaned over and kissed Monkey on the cheek. Sixty years, it had been. And this time he didn’t look astonished.

  Rupert and Jimbo were in the lobby, and Little Fitz was with them, looking very distinguished this morning in a blue suit and a bold red tie. They all stared at her curiously and she realized she must look a fright. “Mama …,” Fitz said. And then he came to her and put his arms around her. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve been better,” she said. In truth, she wanted to go somewhere quiet and dark just now, to escape into sleep or just the absence of thought. To drift, in the comfortable place she had inhabited for the past eight years, an eternal summertime where torpor settled like mist. There was great temptation to do that now, enveloped as she was in her son’s arms, aching with the sting of her daughter’s bitterness.

  But then she thought, There is a great deal to do, even if I don’t have the faintest notion of what it is. So she gave Fitz a pat on the back and he released her. “What time is it?” she asked.

  He looked at his watch. “Almost eleven. Almost time for the parade.”

  “What parade?”

  He gave her a rueful smile. “Fitz Birdsong Day, Mama. The parade, and then the luncheon at the high school. Welcome home, conquering hero, all that rot.”

  She fixed him with a hard look. “There’s not a bit of rot about it, Fitz Birdsong. These are your people.”

  “Despite everything?”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  He nodded. “You’re going to ride in the parade with me.”

  “Me? Lord, no.”

  “Please, Mama.”

  Through the double glass doors of the hospital entrance, she could see his entourage drawn up out front—the big Lincoln limousine, flanked by two highway patrol cars. There was a goodly little knot of men standing around the cars, some in uniform and the rest in suits. She saw Big Deal O’Neill and Doyle Butterworth, Fitz’s campaign manager. And the highway patrol major she had defied at the roadblock. Big Deal gave them a wave and pointed to his watch.

  She saw then how much it meant to Fitz. He had played the fool for all the world to see and he was shot through with remorse. He needed his mother by his side to say to the world, “Look, he may be way out on a limb with his fanny flapping in the breeze, but he’s my boy. Take note of that.”

  So, other things would wait. Bright reached up and patted his cheek. “All right. On one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Take down that silly roadblock at the Quarter.”

  “Mama, they’ve had trouble up there …,” he started.

  “Nonsense. The old schoolhouse burned down and somebody threw a rock. That’s no cause to put the place under siege. It’s an insult to Flavo and everybody who lives there.”

  “But the parade …”

  “Flavo promised me there would be no trouble.”

  Fitz shrugged. “All right. I’ll pull the state people out. But it’s up to Harley and Chief Sipsey about the local boys.”

  “No, I want you to take care of that too. Go talk to them. Don’t you have a radio gizmo or something in your car?”

  “All right,” he said wearily. “There’s never been any use arguing with you, Mama.”

  “I’ll be right out.”

  He left her there, went through the double doors into the hot morning to take care of his business.

  She turned to Rupert and Jimbo. “I think Roseann is ready to go home now.”

  Rupert chewed on the stem of his pipe for a moment and Jimbo looked up at her, still waiting for someone to explain things to him. So she took him by the hand and led him to a nearby sofa, and they sat while Rupert stood back, giving them the moment.

  “Jimbo,” Bright said, “you and Rupert and your mother are going home now, and it may be a while before I see you again.”

  “Why?”

  She thought of making some light thing of it, but then she decided, No, that’s not fair. Why should you be anything but honest with a child? I was not entirely honest with my own. So only the truth here. And she said, “Your mother is very angry with me.”

  “Because we ran away?”

  Bright smiled. “Is that what we did? Maybe so. Yes, that has something to do with it. The main thing is, your mother and I haven’t gotten along very well for a long time.” He looked at her intently, all curiosity. “That happens sometimes, and we’re trying to sort it all out. But it has absolutely nothing to do with you. Your mother loves you very much, and she is a very good mother, and I want you to always mind her and take care of her.”

  “Why don’t you get along?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure I understand it completely. But I’m trying. Do you ever get mad at a friend?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Well, it’s a little like that. Except that grown-ups aren’t so good at patching things up.”

  “Are you and Mama gonna patch things up?”

  “I hope so. Will you help us?”

  “Sure,” he said earnestly.

  “And there is one other thing. Half the money is yours. Do you know what that comes to?”

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Will you accept that as a token of my esteem and a remembrance of a good adventure?”

  A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “I reckon.”

  “Excellent. I’m going to find me a good lawyer and have it put in a trust account in your name. When it comes time to go to college, it’ll be there for you.” She patted him on the knee and started to rise, but Jimbo flung his arms around her neck and squeezed her very hard. She came a bit undone then, and didn’t mind very much at all.

  BOOK 5

  25

  It wasn’t really much of a parade as parades went. A color guard from the Army National Guard leading the way—two men with flags flanked by two more with rifles, all of them in khaki and wearing chrome helmets that shone like beacons in the sunlight; then Chief Homer Sipsey in his police car; the high school band (those who weren’t on summer jobs or at the beach with their parents); a highway patrol cruiser; several automobiles carrying assorted local dignitaries—Mayor Harley Gibbons, the chairman of the county commission, the head of the soil and water conservation board; a marching assortment of Boy and Girl Scouts, Cubs, and Brownies; the county sheriff in his own sedan with a blue bubble on top; a truck towing a flatbed trailer with the attendees of the First Baptist Church Vacation Bible School dressed in biblical attire; another city police car; then the open-top convertible carrying Fitz and Bright, driven by Big Deal O’Neill. And finally, to flesh out the procession, a city street sweeper with a big sign on the side of the cab that read A CLEAN SWEEP FOR LITTLE FITZ. Big Deal had tried to get Holly Hardee and the Live Eye 5 van to join the parade, but Holly Hardee had been in no mood for parading, Big Deal said.

  It wouldn’t be much of a parade route, either. From the Methodist Church parking lot, down Fitzhugh Birdsong Boulevard past Bright’s house, then left along Bascombe, the main business street, for several blocks, and finally left again across Claxton and a straight shot to the high school. It was the same route the Christmas parade followed each year, and
Big Deal O’Neill, who had organized the affair, allowed that there was no use in getting folks confused by changing things around. Big Deal allowed that several times while he scurried about the Methodist Church parking lot (the staging area, he called it) trying to get things moving, shouting instructions, arguing with one of the Baptist mothers who fussed at him from the flatbed trailer while the children fidgeted irritably in the heat. When Fitz and Bright swept up in the limousine with the highway patrol cars wailing front and rear, they were already fifteen minutes late. Big Deal was bathed in sweat, his thinning hair matted to his head, his baby blue button-down dress shirt splotched with sweat, tie loose at the collar. Bright sympathized. Francis O’Neill was Little Fitz Birdsong’s oldest friend, boyhood companion, adult confidant, buddy. He wanted things to go just right, especially with all that had transpired in the past few days. Big Deal wanted to show the rest of the state that, warts and all, Fitz Birdsong’s hometown thought he was the finest thing since sliced bread.

  Heat phantoms rose from the black asphalt of the parking lot, and Bright could feel the sun baking right through the hat they had stopped by her house to fetch. The orchid corsage Big Deal’s wife had pinned to her dress just before they climbed into the convertible was already beginning to show signs of heatstroke. Her brain was in ferment, a swirling caldron of all the things she had set in motion in the space of a few hours.

  “Mama, are you gonna be all right?” Fitz asked. “You want me to get you an umbrella?”

  “No. I look foolish enough without an umbrella.”

  “You don’t look foolish. You look like the governor’s mother. That’s a very nice dress. I don’t believe I’ve seen it before.”

  “Yes,” she said, “you’ve seen it before. I wore it to your inauguration. I don’t believe anybody noticed my dress. They were all gawking at Flavo Richardson.”

  “Speaking of which, the roadblocks are down.”

  “Good. He buried his grandson this morning.”

  “I know. I should have been there.”

  “No,” she said, “he didn’t want us. He called it a private grief. I respect that.”