I tried to smile. That morning, in my grandfather’s house, she’d asked me to heat her a cup of coffee while she dressed. I’d burned my wrist on the kettle. Now, as she talked, I rubbed my tender skin.
“I swear, you remind me so much of your father when we met. This distance thing he had … it was like talking to one of his paintings. People like openness, you know. They respond to it.”
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
My throat was dry, weak with grief. “Are you going to marry this governor guy?” I asked.
“His name is John. He’s not the governor. Yet. And I don’t know.”
“Are you happy?”
She looked at me intensely to see if I was ready for the answer. “I am, son. I really am.”
I stared at the cross in the nave. “Dad never got over — ”
“Do you blame me very much?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Okay.” She thought about this. “Okay, maybe that’s good,” she said. “Let’s talk it out. That might be healthy for us both.”
“I can’t. I’m too sad to be mad,” I said.
She brushed my hair. “Your father all over again. That’s why I’m telling you, don’t dwell on this. If you do, you’ll just wind up miserable all your life, like he was.”
My grandfather was lighting candles at the altar. A few people slipped into the sanctuary. My mother lowered her voice. “Kelly, listen to me. I loved your dad. I really did. I want you to know that.” She moved a little closer to me. “He was a good man. Hard-working, honest. There was never any pretense about him, and I valued that, though God knows his moods drove me nuts. The money didn’t bother me. He made a fine living, supported us well. I had no complaints there. But eventually he got it into his head that I didn’t appreciate what he did, and he wouldn’t let go of that, just as he wouldn’t let go — ”
One of her sisters passed us in the aisle. Mom wiggled two gloved fingers at her.
“What?” I said. “Wouldn’t let go of what?”
She squeezed my hands, then stood hastily. “Your father chose to be a haunted man. I lived with it as long as I could. That’s all.”
My eyes stung. “Haunted how?”
She shook her head.
I understand now, as I remember that morning, watching her march steadily away from me, that she wasn’t made for crickets, rocks, or roses: the incidental blessings of the world that had shaped — irregularly — her husband’s dreams. Her country had never been the Old One, at all — the one she pretended to love — but the productive land that always lay ahead.
We stood behind her sisters to sign the church register. Her signature in the book was as bold as a child’s. After all the “Kellys” on the page, I hesitated, then signed my name “Duffy.” “Duffy Darnell.”
It didn’t look warm or friendly or comfortable to me; it didn’t have an intimate or confident ring. It was the kind of name you’d expect a no-neck halfback to have. A bubba from deep in the cornbelt. Still, I let it stand.
I sat with Mom’s family, who fanned themselves casually with hymnals. They shifted and whispered. They seemed annoyed at having to be here. Dad always knew the score, I thought. He couldn’t even die right, as far as they were concerned.
No wonder he’d kept his feelings to himself.
My grandfather, standing behind the altar, cleared his raspy throat. He wouldn’t look at the casket. I was the only one there, I realized with clarity and shock, sorry to see Dad gone.
“It’s a revolution when Jesus comes into your life,” Grandfather began. I struggled not to be distracted by the candles near the coffin, the shining purple windows, the art of his sacred space.
“He overthrows your doubts, elects the leadership of God in your heart.” He removed his thin black glasses. “Friends, I confess to you: of the many sorrows I feel this day as I bury my boy, the profoundest is my knowledge that he never accepted Christ’s healing touch.”
Mom’s sisters nodded.
No kind words. No fond remembrances. Only chastisement. Disappointment.
Good riddance.
As smoke from the last Roman candle clears, and we stand to leave the baseball field, I almost ask Clay, “How about we go fishing next week, you and me? We haven’t been out for a while.”
But next week is impossible. Ever again is impossible.
People make choices in life. Choices with consequences.
Sermon of the day.
As he lifts his sleeping daughter, I feel the impulse to shake him, hard, by the shoulders. Irrational. I want to ask him, Why did you do this to me? Why didn’t you pay more attention to your wife? Why did you put me in the painful position of having to steal her from you?
This was no accident.
One day, on a fishing trip north of Houston, when I was first getting to know him, he admitted to me that Sharon seemed restless. “I don’t think we were ever really in love,” he said. “No lightning bolts, you know? No great romance. It’s just that we liked each other, we were solid together, and when we met, we were both ready to settle down and have a child.”
Now I think: Why did he tell me this, that day?
Why did he spring this on me?
If only we’d both been better at small talk. If only we’d both known sports, the way men in America — even failures like my father — are supposed to.
If only I hadn’t taken my mother’s advice, and worked so strenuously at chipping away my shyness.
In his car, on our way to the cemetery to lay my father to rest, Grandfather Darnell handed me a shoebox. We’d arranged to sell most of Dad’s things, including the Cutlass and the house. I’d taken a couple of paintings — generic landscapes, lovely and lush, all I had space for in the dorm. The rest we’d give to Goodwill. Mom kept a chest of drawers and a trunk they’d purchased together. Grandfather asked to have back the china he’d bought them as a wedding gift, to use at church socials. The shoebox was mine.
In it I discovered cufflinks, blank notepads, a couple of tubes of paint and a brush, a ring, and a watch. Handling them was like strolling through a discount aisle at Duffy’s, toying with all the goodies. I picked up the watch. It gleamed in cold sunlight slanting through the car’s front windshield. It wasn’t the watch from my father’s old story. I knew that. This was a newer piece, unremarkable. “Grandfather,” I said, “how much did you pay for the watch Dad lost — you know, the night of the movie fire?”
He answered right away. “Twenty-three fifty, a pretty penny back then. I should have known better than to trust that boy with something so fine.”
It didn’t shock me that he recalled the precise value after all this time. I don’t know why I asked him the question, except to marvel at the depth of abuse being heaped on my father that day.
He noticed, then, the burn spot on my wrist, egg-shaped, the color of custard. “Careless this morning with the kettle?”
“Yes sir.”
He nodded. “Your mother told me. You’re not a daydreamer, are you, son?”
“No sir.”
“Your father.” He poked a finger at me. “He was dreaming that day in the movie house, drawing his silly pictures, and look what came of that.”
I wanted to shout, “It was only a watch!”
“God’s grace, nothing less — it’s the only thing that kept Sheriff Stevenson from pressing charges.”
Thank the wind, I thought. “For burning the theater?” I said.
He waved his hand. “Oh, the building didn’t matter. It was about to fall down anyway. The problem was Old Lady Jones.”
I remembered the name from long ago. “Who?”
He clucked, bitterly. “You’ve never heard this part of the story, have you?”
“No sir.”