Pop grunted. His face turned red. Possum flopped across his knees and snuffled the front of his overalls lovingly. “Fool dog,” Pop whispered, then turned his face away and looked out his window.
Later, back at the farm, Pop had nothing good to say about the new TV. “Too big. Nobody needs a thing this big. And new recliners, too. Where’s my old lounger?”
“You mean the one with the broken springs and the split leather? They hauled it off when they delivered the new ones. Which one do you want, the green leather one or the tan leather one?”
Possum, who’d come running in, promptly choose the green one by jumping into it and barking at Pop.
“You’re a turncoat!” he growled and edged Possum over so he could sit down. “All right, son, turn that monster TV on. Your mother would say it’s ‘tacky,’ just like that aluminum Christmas tree you bought for her one year.”
“I heard you decorated one more tree for her last Christmas,” I said quietly.
He looked away. “She needed her Ugly Tree.”
The Ugly Tree. She’d always send my father out into the woods to cut down the ugliest tree he could find for Christmas. To her, making it beautiful with decorations was loving it to life. I took my place in the beige chair beside him, hit the button on the remote, and found the ball game.
“By the way, Pop, I ran into Mayor Ida when I was arranging for the television. She asked me if I’d play Santa Claus this year in the Christmas parade. What do you think?”
“I don’t know why anybody would want to. I always nearly froze to death up on that fire truck. Then when you come down, the brats will pull your whiskers and the babies spit up on you.”
“So you think I ought to tell her no.”
“I don’t know about that. You’re a Brady. And being Santa is a Brady tradition. That is if you’re into that sort of thing. I never was.”
Tradition. Home. Mossy Creek. There was something to be said for all of that. “Maybe I’ll give it a try. And maybe we’ll cut down and decorate an Ugly Tree for Christmas. What do you say?”
He stared hard at the giant television set, his jaw working and his eyes wet. He scrubbed a hand over them. “I say you talk too much. You’re just like Ellie used to be, always interfering with me watching the game. I’m betting on Georgia. Guess you’ll take Tech.”
“That’s right, Ed.”
He snorted.
I let up the footrest on my recliner and stretched out. Some things never changed. And maybe that’s what tradition was, making the past a bridge to the future.
* * * *
Over the next few days, I cooked safe, ordinary food and talked about safe, ordinary subjects. Pop ate and grumbled. I cleaned the house, rebuilt the floor of the front porch, and even hung new living room curtains to replace a dingy pair of bath towels Pop had thrown over the curtain rod after mice chewed holes in the old drapes.
Pop pretended not to notice anything I did until two days before Halloween, when I decided to crank the tractor. I planned to clear the sagebrush and frostbitten weeds choking the ditches on either side of Mama’s grand driveway. I didn’t think any kids would come trick-or-treating so far out of town—when I was a kid we all gathered up on the square and got our candy from the shop owners—but if any kids did venture up our driveway, I’d at least make sure they didn’t hurry back down to South Bigelow Road brushing beggar lice off their Star Wars Jedi robes and pulling blackberry briars from their Batman capes.
The tractor refused to make a sound. I went into town, bought a new battery and new spark plugs, installed them, and cleaned the tractor’s carburetor. Nothing helped. Pop sat on the porch watching me all morning before he finally roused himself and, using a stick for a cane, made his way to the barn.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I thought I’d clear the driveway and mow the pasture.”
He looked surprised. “Why?”
“Well, it’s almost Halloween. We might have some kids.”
“Doubt that. I’m the crazy old man of South Bigelow Road.”
Right. He played Santa Claus every year at Christmas, and the kids loved him. Pop was just being ornery. I shrugged. “I’m still going to get this tractor running.”
“Didn’t think you’d even remember how.” He poked the rusting John Deere symbol on the engine cover. “Ain’t got no computer for you to use.”
“Maybe I’ll add one.”
He stared at me until he realized I was joking. “She’ll run, but she’s a mite touchy,” he said.
“That she is,” I agreed. “Any suggestions on how I can get the engine to crank?”
“Been a while,” he said, running his knotted fingers across the tractor’s fender as if they were communicating through the metal. “The last time I drove her it was to see Ellie. Then I broke my leg, and Chief Amos wouldn’t let me back on the highway. She might need a little toddy to grease up her innards.”
“Toddy? Don’t tell me you still claim to pour liquor into the gas tank.”
He laughed. I hadn’t heard him laugh in a very long time. “Moonshine’s good for what ails a body. Even a tractor likes it.”
I called his bluff. “Let’s go get some, then.”
He eyed me, smiling. “Aw, just pour a little diesel fuel in her gas tank and let it set a spell. That ought to do it.”
It did. The tractor started the next day. And so did Pop. It was as if he needed some job to grease his own innards. In fact, he insisted on mowing the sides of the driveway himself. I started to say no, then took a look at his face and just opened the front gate to let him through. I sat on the porch and watched my father clear his road. Pop knew every inch. As the brush got mowed down, I realized he was leaving one scrawny pine tree in the corner where the road ran close to a pasture fence.
Our Ugly Tree, for Christmas.
Two hours later, he drove the tractor into the barn and climbed down. There was a lightness in his shuffle as he headed for the porch with his stick-cane perched on one shoulder like a fishing pole. He pulled up the bucket from the well and plunged the tin dipper into the cold water. “Nothing like a good cold drink of water after working hard.” He sat down on the porch and wiped the perspiration and flecks of grass from his face. “Been a while.”
“Why’d you let everything grow up like that?” I asked.
“Didn’t seem to matter. Couldn’t see it from the porch anyway. All the livestock’s gone. And old Possum even quit chasing the rabbits out of the brush.”
I stroked the old hound’s head. He lay devotedly by Pop’s feet. “Your hunting dogs were the only friends you ever needed—other than Mama.”
A frown wrinkled his forehead, and he stared at me. “There was you, boy.”
“Me? I don’t know. I didn’t seem to fit into your scheme of things. Farming, tractors, livestock. The only animals I liked were the chickens, and then we ate them. I was out of place. But you and Mama had each other. I thought about it a lot. You didn’t seem to need me.”
“No need to think on families. We don’t have to be alike. Thinking like that makes a person crazy. What is just is. Ellie was my wife. You’re my boy. That’s all you have to be. I always thought you leaving home had something to do with them Bigelow boys stealing the ram. Wish you hadn’t left home, but you did, and you made a life for yourself. It didn’t have to be my kind of life.”
In his mind it was that simple. Family. We connect with each other in whatever way we can. We don’t have to be the other person. We just have to be ourselves. “I’m sorry I didn’t want to be a farmer when I was growing up. What I loved in high school—running track, playing tennis—all that was nonsense to you. You told me so.”
“I thought you ought to be learning to make a living instead of playing,” he said.
“That ‘playing’ got me an athletic scholarship to college. It got me an education.” He wouldn’t have understood that my education led me to another kind of play. Computer games. “I was lucky to be
in the right place at the right time.”
“And now you’ve come home. Ellie said you would. I wish it had been sooner. While she still knew who you were.”
“So do I,” I said gruffly.
“Son, I don’t know what’s in your mind, but you don’t have to do all this.”
“Like you always told me when I was a kid, ‘Brady’s don’t do anything they don’t want to, but when they do, they don’t talk much.’”
“Guess I never did too much of that, did I? Talking.”
“Neither did I. Think we can change that?”
“Maybe. There is something that’s been bothering me. Don’t you think it’s time you tell me the truth about that homecoming night and the ram?”
“Does it really matter now?”
“Considering all the talk about the old high school these days, I think it does.”
“What happened to me was ten years before the fire.”
“Then it’s so long in the past you ought to just tell me. But if you can’t tell me, I’ll respect your decision.”
I sat there another long time, the past rising up inside me like the cold, clear Creek water that fed the well of our Brady heritage. And then I began to talk.
* * * *
1971
Punky Hartwell and I were stationed by a makeshift pen filled with hay in the graveled parking lot behind Mossy Creek High. There stood Ulysses the ram, the school mascot who preceded Samson. Two Creekite boys were elected to watch over the mascot every year before homecoming, (this was before teachers like Dwight Truman took over the job,) and that year Punky and I won the honor of being Ulysses’ royal guardsmen. All we had to do was keep him safe until he was led onto the football field during the homecoming halftime show.
A pretty girl from our rival, Bigelow High, called to me from beside her little blue Mustang. She was crying. I left Punky with Ulysses and went off into the darkness to change a tire for her. She thanked me with a kiss. Several kisses. When I got back to the pen, Punky and Ulysses were gone. I’d been set up by the Bigelow boys.
I jumped into a friend’s car and went after them. Tracked them south of Mossy Creek and out to Hamilton Farm.
When I drove up, I saw a truck tearing out of Ida Hamilton Walker’s front pasture. I heard somebody yelling from the Hamilton grain silo. Then I heard a terrified ‘baaaah’ that could only be Ulysses. Both cries for help came from forty feet above my head. I tilted my head back and stared at the dark silhouette of the Hamilton silo against a moonlit sky.
Punky and the ram were up there.
The Bigelowans had stranded Punky and Ulysses forty feet high on a narrow, hand-cranked elevator platform that was used to lift sacks of grain up to a hatch on the silo’s curving metal roof, where the grain was dumped inside for storage. The platform, which had no safety rails of any kind, was barely big enough for Ulysses, let alone the terrified Punky.
“Help me, Eddie!” Punky screamed. He pressed himself as flat against the silo’s side as possible. Beside him, Ulysses danced from foot to foot and baaahed wildly.
“I’ll let you and Ulysses down slowly—just hold on!”
I grabbed the hand crank and tried to inch the platform down smoothly. It dropped several inches with a screech of gears and the metallic clank of chain jerking hard. Punky screamed. Ulysses butted Punky in the stomach, and, since the platform had no safety railings, suddenly Punky Hartwell fell past me and hit the ground, hard. Punky lay there moaning, and I stared at him in horror. His right leg was broken. But worse than that, he’d landed face down on a small tree branch. Blood dripped from the corner of his left eye socket. The eye looked mushy. My stomach rolled.
“Don’t tell anyone how it happened,” Punky begged. “Those Bigelow boys are with the Fang and Claw Club. If we get them in trouble, they’ll kill us.”
“I’m not letting them get away with this.”
He moaned. “The leader was Ham Bigelow!”
“You saw him? Good. Then you can tell Chief Royden.” Battle Royden wouldn’t hesitate a second about arresting the rich son of the richest family in the county.
“No! I’ll never tell! I’ll swear I don’t know who did it! And you can’t tell either, Eddie! If you do, the Bigelowans will protect Ham and hurt you! Your daddy has farm loans with their bank, Eddie! They’ll call in the loans and take everything him and your mama own! Give me your word! You won’t tell!”
I groaned low under my breath. “I give you my word.” Then I ran up to Miss Ida’s big house with a weight inside me like a stone.
In the aftermath of Punky’s accident, he and I were accused of playing some kind of stupid joke—that is, “kidnapping” our own school’s mascot—and I was blamed for hoisting Punky and Ulysses up the grain elevator.
Punky lost his left eye.
I lost the power to tell the truth.
Pop and Mama were humiliated and could only believe the worst about me.
One afternoon, I cornered Ham Bigelow behind a bank of laurel shrubs outside his parents’ country club, down in Bigelow. I slugged him in the mouth, broke two of his front teeth, then stood over him as he lay on the ground, moaning and bleeding.
“I know you set Punky up as an initiation prank for your damned Fang and Claw Society,” I told him. “You sneaking coward. I swore I wouldn’t tell anyone what you did, but I’ll always know the truth. Don’t show your face at another Mossy Creek homecoming game. Ever. Or I’ll knock out the rest of your teeth.”
Ham’s head lolled.
He was never seen at a homecoming game, again.
* * * *
Thirty years later, Pop and I sat in silence on the porch.
“All I could think about,” I said gruffly, “was that Ed Brady’s son let the ram get stolen and let Punky get hurt. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth. It seemed important to keep quiet, back then. I gave Punky my word.”
“A man’s word is always important, son. I’m proud of you.”
I hadn’t expected him to understand. I swallowed hard. My eyes blurred with tears. Naturally, I changed the subject. “Now, you want to tell me why you didn’t cut down that last ugly pine tree in the pasture, Daddy?”
“Daddy? Don’t get soft on me, son. That ugly tree is a story for another day. Too much confession at a time gives a man a heartache.” He smiled at me. And suddenly, after all those years, we shared a peaceful moment, just the two of us.
Father and son.
* * * *
Halloween night was a bust, as far as trick-or-treaters went. I’d bought a couple of bags of bubblegum and chocolate bars, just in case, but by ten o’clock Pop went to bed, so I turned out the porch lights and took the candy upstairs to my room. I opened the window and climbed out. The window had seemed larger when I was sixteen. I lay on the roof, planting my heels against a two-by-four I’d nailed along the edge to keep myself from falling off.
Now, almost thirty years later, I had to bend my knees to fit into the space. Looking up at a full moon and the stars in the night sky, I thought about my father and how he had respected my promise.
The sound of a car roaring up the driveway broke into my thoughts. I heard young voices, laughter and a couple of spirited “Go, Bigelow Wildcats!” Then the car backed out and screeched down the road toward Bigelow.
With a spidery feeling zippering up my spine, I climbed down the oak tree for the first time in thirty years. Quietly, I headed along the long gravel drive in the dark, ready to surprise anyone planning to give us a trick instead of a treat. I needn’t have bothered. Our visitor began making enough noise to drown out my movements. The intruder stumbled into a patch of moonlight.
“Agggh. Why’d I do this-ss?” a youthful male voice slurred. “Initiation-smitiation. Agggh.” The sounds that followed were unmistakable; he was throwing up. Moans followed. “Fang and Claw. Fang and Claw. Agggh. Should call it the Hurl and Vomit Society, ‘stead.”
The Fang and Claw Society.
Bigelow High’s no
torious secret prank club had gone completely underground after Punky lost his eye. Now it was supposed to be just legend. Or maybe not.
I swore and started toward the victim in the moon-streaked darkness. I could see him hunched over the top rail of Pop’s pasture fence.
“Hold onto the rail,” I called drily. “And don’t turn your face upwind.”
The boy whirled around and tried to run. His feet got tangled in a clump of newly mowed brush, and he fell with a thud. “Aggh.”
“Are you all right?” I knelt beside him.
“Yes, sir,” he managed, trying unsuccessfully to sit up.
“I’ll give you a hand. Ed Brady, here. Who’re you?”
“You’re not Mr. Brady.”
“Mr. Brady’s my father. What’s your name?”
He hesitated, then groaned in defeat. “Will Bigelow, sir. Just kill me and get it over with, please. Before my parents get the chance.”
Will Bigelow. John and Sue Ora’s teenage son. “Sorry, Will, but I’ve got to call them.” I took him by one arm and helped him stagger to his feet. “Let’s get you to the house and clean you up. At least your mother won’t have to cover her nose when she gets here.”
Will groaned. “Just call my mom. She’ll kill me, but she won’t Bigelow me to death like my dad does.”
“Bigelow you to death?”
“You know. It’s like you hear a drum roll, and you’re told, ‘You’re a Bigelow, Boy. There are standards for people who bear the Bigelow name.’”
I smothered a laugh. “Been there, done that, Will. I’m Ed Brady’s boy. You’re John Bigelow’s son. Fathers always have expectations.”
The kid moaned.
“Come on. Tell you what. I’ll help you wash up with the garden hose, then drive you over to your mother’s house. Give you some time to get your story straight.”
“I just hope Dad’s not there. Agggh. For once, I’d be glad they don’t live together all the time. He’ll never understand this. Never.”
I led the kid up to the house and reached for the garden hose by the front porch. “So I gather the Fang and Claw Society still exists?”
Reunion at Mossy Creek Page 33
