by Peggy Webb
“Thomas Jennings,” he said, not even turning his head. “l6th Infantry, lst Division.”
“Fred Lollar, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, l0lst Airborne Division.”
Sometimes prayers you didn’t even know you’d prayed were answered. It was that way with Thomas. For the next hour they couldn’t talk fast enough, and by the time Thomas pulled his two biscuits with bacon out of the sack, he’d told Fred all about the man he was looking for, everything except the million dollar check.
Good soldiers don’t ask questions. Fred munched his honey bun and stared into the distance.
“I reckon I can help you find him,” he said.
“I’m not askin’ for chairty.”
“I ain’t offering it. Just a neighborly hand.”
“That’s different.” Thomas broke half his biscuit off and handed it to Fred. “Too much sugar’ll take all the wind out of you.”
When Fred bit in, Thomas could tell he was impressed.
“I made ‘em myself.”
“Eula’s been dead twenty years, but I never did learn to cook.”
“Maybe I’ll teach you sometime.”
They shifted positions on the bench, two withered sunflowers moving with the light. Thomas left only to make sure Nicky ate lunch and to take him to the toilet and the water fountain.
In later afternoon there was a flat quality to the light, and the day suddenly went still. Anticipation hung so thick it was like a fog in front of your face, and Thomas could tell by the way his neck prickled that something was fixing to happen, something so important it was going to require all his attention.
He and Fred were discussing the merits of checkers versus dominoes, and he shushed Fred in mid-sentence. Fred drew into himself like an old turtle, and the wool cap slid down to hide his bushy eyebrows.
“Over yonder,” Thomas whispered, nodding in the direction of the water fountain. “It’s him.”
“Bingo.”
Fred pushed the cap up and both of them stared at the man wearing the gray three-pieced suit. There was no mistaking him, hair so black it swallowed the light, eyes that even at this distance could look straight through you, a face that looked like it was dreamed up by a sculptor.
“What are you going to do?” Fred said.
“Wait.”
The man beside the fountain was talking to a woman with not a single feature to distinguish herself. She could be one of a thousand women past middle age who would enter the grocery stores and the shopping malls and the pharmacies on any given day of the week, conduct their business and leave without anybody even noticing they’d been there. Not even her dress showed a shred of evidence about her life.
“What’s he doing?” Fred said.
If Thomas hadn’t already seen him not two feet away, he would’ve had no idea that the man in gray was handing a check to the woman who could pass through a crowd without even causing a ripple.
“Watch him,” he whispered. “I’ll go get Nicky.”
“But I want to stay and play,” Nicky said when Thomas explained what they were going to do.
“You don’t want to miss a grand adventure, do you?”
“Can I take my fire truck?”
“Sure. I’ll take it for you.” Thomas stuck the small truck into his pants pocket. He didn’t want a thing to slow them down. Of course, Nicky was going to slow him down some, but he was not about to leave the child with Fred, even though his gut instinct told him he could trust Fred with his life.
He tucked the child’s hand securely in his and trotted toward the fountain.
“Where are we going?” Nicky asked.
“Detectives don’t know where they’re goin’ till they get there. Now be real quiet or he’ll see us.”
He heard a huffing sound and glanced back to see Fred.
“What are you doin’?”
“Following that skinny man.” Fred was wheezing like a pump organ.
“You’d better go back and sit down. I told you honey buns would cut your wind.”
“Honey buns, smunny buns. You’re going to need me, you crazy old coot.”
“I’d like to know how you figure that.”
“In my prime I was a private detective.”
“Come on, then. Just keep your voice down and your eyes open. And quit that wheezin’.”
“What about you, thrashing around like a herd of buffalo?”
The man they were following began to zigzag. He was onto them, probably because of all the noise Fred was making. Thomas knew he should have made him stay behind.
“Where’s he at?” Fred caught up to him, red-faced.
“Over yonder. He’s tryin’ to lose us.”
“I’m too old for this.”
“Who asked you to come?”
“You’re not doing much better yourself, you old buffalo.”
“Warthog.”
“Papa,” Nicky pulled at Thomas’ hand. “Mommy said calling names is ugly.”
“Now see what you’ve done?”
“Me?” Fred Lollar puffed up like a frog. “You’re the one started the argument.”
“Well, I don’t have time to finish it. I have a job to do. Elizabeth’s countin’ on me.”
“Where’d the man go?” Fred said.
With a sinking feeling, Thomas realized he’d lost him. And it was all Fred’s fault.
“How do I know? You were standin’ there jabbering at me like a jaybird.”
“Me? You’re the one who took up the fight.”
Nicky pulled on Thomas’s sleeve. “He went to the toilet.”
“Do you want me to go smoke him out?” Fred said.
“Nope. You might tip him off.”
Thomas glanced at the sun. Another hour and Elizabeth would be at the park to fetch them. That gave them plenty of time.
“We’ll just sit here and wait him out.”
o0o
David was not pleased by the news McKenzie brought.
“You’re sure it was Thomas Jennings?”
“Positive.”
“I don’t have to ask how you lost them.”
The suit and tie were wadded in a bundle on the floor. McKenzie was stretched out in an easy chair in shorts and a tee shirt, dark hair rumpled, shoes kicked off, bare toes wiggling.
David would never allow such informal behavior from any of his other employees, but he would tolerate almost anything from McKenzie for one reason, and one alone: his sister would never betray him.
McKenzie giggled. “I imagine they’re still out there waiting for a skinny man in a three-piece suit to come out of the toilet.”
David went to the window and trained his telescope toward the park. It didn’t take him long to find them, two old men and a little boy, sitting dejectedly on a park bench waiting for a man who would never appear.
“How long does it take for a whizz?” Thomas said.
“I told you to let me go in and smoke him out, but no, you’re so all-fired sure you know everything.”
“He must have skipped out, but how? There are no windows in the toilet.”
“Maybe he’s Houdini.”
“That’s not funny. Elizabeth’s counting on me to find him.”
That was all David needed to know. He shut the blinds, then sat in the gloom.
“You won’t be going to the park for a while,” he told his sister.
“I can use the friendly grandmother disguise, or my favorite, the teenaged boy.”
Elizabeth Jennings was trying to find out his identity. How many others had tried? And how long before one of them succeeded? Maybe it was time to set up a foundation. He probably should have done it long ago. He could still keep his anonymity. What he would lose, though, would be the thin, frail connection he had with the people below him in the park - his lifeline.
“No,” he said. “Go back down to the farm, McKenzie. I’ve kept you away from your animals too long.”
McKenzie’s animals were the sixteen cats and ten d
ogs she claimed as her own as well as those who were her patients. She was a vet, practicing on three thousand acres of peaceful farmland in New Albany, Mississippi, a legacy to David and McKenzie from their mother.
The farm was more than legacy, more than a piece of land: it was a place of refuge, a place where peace could seep into a man’s soul and make life more bearable.
Though their mother’s farm was now David’s and McKenzie’s place of escape, it was the land of their father that had nurtured their deep love of nature; it was in northeast Tennessee where a body could look up from the steep sloping tobacco fields into the face of a wild beauty that made the heart ache.
A pigtailed hellion running wild, McKenzie used to bring home mangy stray dogs from Crackers Neck and Shouns, and birds with broken wings from Iron Mountain, which rose up like a benevolent giant behind their house, while David trailed along to keep his sister from harm.
The year that changed their lives, she’d brought home a hawk she’d found sitting as docile as a canary on an outcropping of rocks high in Doe Mountain, which they could see from their front porch. And though he looked like a perfectly healthy bird, she swore he was dying of a broken heart. His mate had been lying dead at the base of the rock.
Their father, Clint Lassiter, was not happy that his willful daughter had brought home a hawk.
“It’s not natural for a hawk to be earth bound. That bird’s an omen, Della Jean,” he’d said, and his wife, still a maverick of Mississippi meadows and ancient shiny-leafed magnolias, had teased him about his mountaineer superstitions.
The next day his tractor overturned and his blood spilled over the rocky ridges he’d called home for forty-seven years.
Della Jean oversaw the burning of her husband’s bones then personally spread them over the land he loved in spite of Baptist rumors that cremation was an invention of the Methodists and she would go to hell a poppin’ for such sacrilege.
Rumors had been swirling around Della Jean ever since she came to visit a cousin during the height of the Bean Festival and turned down an opportunity to be Mt. City’s Bean Queen. Back then when Mt. City was still the bean capital of the U. S. and women who could pick twenty bushels of bush beans in one day thought there was nothing finer than wearing the bean crown, Della Jean distinguished herself by refusing to even enter the contest.
She’d always been stubborn as a mule, even at seventeen, but that didn’t save Clint Lassiter. That’s the way the locals put it about one of their favorite native sons: Della Jean came to town and Clint was lost. He’d taken one look at her eating beans and cornbread in Arney’s Grill and vowed he’d found the girl he was going to marry.
He began his courtship on the spot, and two days later when he proposed to her right on the street in front of Muse’s Hardware, she said yes. Clint Lassiter took his bride to Doe Valley where he commenced raising beans, tobacco, and two children.
And though Della Jean had a life-long love affair with the corner of northeast Mississippi where you could walk right out the front door of her daddy’s feed and seed store and be standing on the Tallahatchie River Bridge, she loved Clint Lassiter more. They were never apart, working and laughing and loving side by side until the day he died.
“Finally, she’ll go back home where she belongs,” folks said about her then, not knowing how her attachment to Clint extended beyond death and how she would stand on the spot where his tractor had overturned every evening for the next nine years and listen to his blood sing love songs to her from the rocks, how she would stand there until the cancer made her so weak all she could do was look out the window and say his name.
She told her children she wasn’t about to be older than Clint when she finally rejoined him, and she’d died two days short of her forty-seventh birthday. Nobody said anything about the heathen aspects of cremation when her children spread half her ashes over the high meadows where Clint still whispered in the tall grasses and the Queen Anne’s Lace, and the other half over the farm in New Albany she’d never ceased loving. They were too stunned at their own grief. For over the years and unbeknownst to them, the Mississippi girl they’d said would never fit in had become one of them. The whole town turned out to bid farewell to the woman who had driven through the town twenty years earlier waving at everybody she saw in spite of the fact that not a single soul waved back.
The day Della Jean died was the day the hawk left.
The broad winged hawk McKenzie had found grief-stricken on Doe Mountain had still been with them, the hawk she’d loved back to life. Over the next nine years it followed her like a surrogate father, flying in descending circles over her head as she raced through Doe Valley on her bicycle or ran barefoot up the steep slopes after the rhododendrons had faded and the sweet summer grasses whiskered the face of the mountains.
McKenzie called him Solomon, because of his wisdom she’d said, although she could never quite understand why he refused all offers of freedom.
Her senior year in high school she’d talked David into driving her to the lookout in Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania, where broad-winged hawks like Solomon could be seen by the thousands in spectacular September migration.
“Fly away,” she’d said. “Find a nice lady hawk to love.”
Solomon, aptly named, had answered her with his thin un-hawk-like whistle and sat staunchly on her shoulder where he would remain until Della Jean drew her last breath. Then he rose up on his barred wings, circled the house once and soared over the valley toward Doe Mountain, his mission at last complete.
McKenzie never had another hawk, but she’d learned her lesson from Solomon well. Now she was the one with a mission.
The work she did for David was merely a sideline, a labor of love she often told him, and he knew it was true.
No one loved him as much as McKenzie. In fact, no one loved him except McKenzie. He would never have what his parents had. He would never know the joy of finding a soul mate and loving her so much that the two of them could never be parted, even in death.
And why should he? He was the one who had led his men into that death trap in Iraq. Nine men went in and only one came out. Macky Evans, about to become a father for the first time. Dead. Jim Branch, living for the day he could return to Maine and buy his own lobster boat. Dead. Charles Black who would never be a farmer, Wayne Linden who would never be an avionics engineer, Clyde Mason, John White... The list went on and on.
They’d all started out like David, full of hope and dreams, and they’d all been blown to bits. All because of David. The darkness of his tower room couldn’t begin to hide his shame.
Deep down in her soul where the wild hawk still soared McKenzie believed she could love him back to life.
He knew this ... and knew its impossibility.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Life.”
McKenzie had learned how to endure David’s dark room and his darker moods. She’d learned the art of tranquility. David envied her. He could remain silent for hours, unmoving except for an occasional twitching muscle. But there was nothing tranquil about his stillness, nothing peaceful. He was a deep river, full of treacherous shoals and turbulent currents, dark and murky and filled with memories that made him wake at night drenched in sweat.
“Are we going to sit in the dark long?” she asked.
“I am. You don’t have to stay.”
McKenzie didn’t answer right away. She’d always been this way, even when she was a little kid, weighing her words so long that sometimes the person she was talking to gave up and went home before the conversation was finished.
David had learned to read her silences.
“No, I don’t plan to go down to the farm, and I don’t want to go to your apartment to eat chicken soup,” he said.
She didn’t deny that she’d made soup. Every time she made the drive up to Memphis to do one of David’s errands, she made a big pot of chicken soup. She subscribed wholeheartedly to their mother’s wisdom. Della Jean had always sa
id, “If you want to nourish the soul, you must first nourish the body.”
“Food for the soul,” McKenzie said.
“I don’t have a soul.”
The fact that she didn’t light into him right away didn’t fool David for a minute. She was saving her guns for a bigger target.
“I’m getting too old for these errands,” she said. “You’re going to have to find somebody else.”
“You’re in better shape than most thirty year olds I know, and you’d scratch out the eyes of anybody who tried to take your place.”
“The trouble with you, David, is that you don’t know any thirty-year-olds.” His look warned her, but she ignored him. “I wish you’d consider seeing Dr. Michaels again. Or even consulting someone else. I really think plastic surgery would help.”
“Help what? Make me look less like a monster and more like a man wearing a Halloween mask?”
Ignoring that shot, she plowed right on. “Have you thought what your life is going to be like twenty years from now?”
“What about you, McKenzie? Why aren’t you out with some charming young man instead of hanging around with an older brother or talking to a dozen cats?”
“Show me a man who’s as smart and sweet and loyal as a cat and I’ll show you a living, breathing miracle. There’s no such animal, big brother. Present company excepted. And of course, Paul.”
Paul Matthews, the husband she’d adored, dead for five years now, cut down on their first anniversary by a drunken driver who had swerved onto the sidewalk right in front of their house. She’d been inside lighting candles on the table when she heard the commotion. Racing outside she’d found her husband fallen among a dozen bruised and scattered roses. He’d died in her arms.
“Paul wouldn’t want you to be alone, McKenzie.”
Gathering her belongings, McKenzie gave him a look that conveyed in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t about to enter into a discussion about why she had chosen to remain alone.
“Change your mind about the soup. Say yes, David.”
