Parnell had to pull the car over to the curb. He hit Richard once, a fast clean right hand, not enough to make him unconscious but enough to calm him down.
“You didn’t do it, did you?”
“He’s my father, Parnell. I don’t know what to do. I love him so much I don’t want to see him suffer. But I love him so much I don’t want to see him die, either.”
Parnell let the kid sob. He thought of his old friend Bud Garrett and what a good goddamn fun buddy he’d been and then he started crying, too.
When Parnell came down Richard was behind the steering wheel.
Parnell got in the car and looked around the empty parking lot and said, “Drive.”
“Any place especially?”
“Out along the East River road. Your old man and I used to fish off that little bridge there.”
Richard drove them. From inside his sport coat Parnell took the pint of Jim Beam.
When they got to the bridge Parnell said, “Give me five minutes alone and then you can come over, OK?”
Richard was starting to sob again.
Parnell got out of the car and went over to the bridge. In the hot night you could hear the hydroelectric dam half a mile downstream and smell the fish and feel the mosquitoes feasting their way through the evening.
He thought of what Bud Garrett had said, “Put it in some whiskey for me, will you?”
So Parnell had obliged.
He stood now on the bridge looking up at the yellow circle of moon thinking about dead people, his wife and many of his WWII friends, the rookie cop who’d died of a sudden tumor, his wife with her rosary-wrapped hands. Hell, there was probably even a chance that nurse from Enid, Oklahoma, was dead.
“What do you think’s on the other side?” Bud Garrett had asked just half an hour ago. He’d almost sounded excited. As if he were a farm kid about to ship out with the Merchant Marines.
“I don’t know,” Parnell had said.
“It scare you, Parnell?”
“Yeah,” Parnell had said. “Yeah it does.”
Then Bud Garrett had laughed. “Don’t tell the kid that. I always told him that nothin’ scared you.”
Richard came up the bridge after a time. At first he stood maybe a hundred feet away from Parnell. He leaned his elbows on the concrete and looked out at the water and the moon. Parnell watched him, knowing it was all Richard, or anybody, could do.
Look out at the water and the moon and think about dead people and how you yourself would soon enough be dead.
Richard turned to Parnell then and said, his tears gone completely now, sounding for the first time like Parnell’s sort of man, “You know, Parnell, my father was right. You’re a brave sonofabitch. You really are.”
Parnell knew it was important for Richard to believe that — that there were actually people in the world who didn’t fear things the way most people did — so Parnell didn’t answer him at all.
He just took his pint out and had himself a swig and looked some more at the moon and the water.
Seasons of the Heart
For Charlotte MacLeod
In the mornings now, the fog didn’t burn off till much before eight, and the dew stayed silver past nine, and the deeper shadows stayed all morning long in the fine red barn I’d helped build last year. The summer was fleeing.
But that wasn’t how I knew autumn was coming.
No, for that all I had to do was look at the freckled face of my granddaughter, Lisa, who would be entering eighth grade this year at the consolidated school ten miles west.
For as much as she read, and when she wasn’t doing chores she was always reading something, even when she sat in front of the TV, she hated school. I don’t think she’d had her first serious crush yet, and the girlfriends available to her struck her as a little frivolous. They were town girls and they didn’t have Lisa’s responsibilities.
This particular morning went pretty much as usual.
We had a couple cups of coffee, Lisa and I, and then we hiked down to the barn. It was still dark. You could hear the horses in the hills waking with the dawn, and closer by the chickens. Turn-over day was coming, a frantic day in the life of a farmer. You take the birds to market and then have twenty-four hours to clean out the chicken house before the new shipment of baby chicks arrives. First time I ever did it, I was worn out for three days. That’s when my daughter, Emmy, read me the Booker T. Washington quote I’d come to savor: “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as writing a poem.” Those particular words work just as well as Bengay on sore muscles. For me, anyway.
The barn smelled summer sweet of fresh milk. Lisa liked to lead the animals into the stalls; she had her own reassuring way of talking to them in a language understood only by cows and folk under fourteen years of age. She also liked to hook them up.
The actual milking, I usually did. Lisa always helped me pour the fresh milk into dumping stations. We tried to get a lot of milk per day. We had big payments to make on this barn. The Douglas fir we’d used for the wood hadn’t come cheap. Nor had the electricity, the milking machines or the insulation. You’ve got to take damned good care of dairy cattle.
I worked straight through till Lisa finished cleaning up the east end of the barn. This was one of those days when she wanted to do some of the milking herself. I was happy to let her do it.
Everything went fine till I stepped outside the barn to have a few puffs on my pipe.
Funny thing was, I’d given up both cigarettes and pipe years before. But after Dr. Wharton, back in Chicago when I was still with the flying service, told me about the cancer, I found an old briar pipe of mine and took it up again. I brought it to the farm with me when I came to live with Emmy. I never smoked it in an enclosed area. I didn’t want Lisa to pick up any secondhand smoke.
The chestnut mare was on the far hill. She was a beauty and seemed to know it, always prancing about to music no one else seemed to hear, or bucking against the sundown sky when she looked all mythic and ethereal in the darkening day.
And that’s just what I was doing, getting my pipe fired up and looking at the roan, when the rifle shot ripped away a large chunk of wood from the door frame no more than three inches to my right.
I wasn’t sure what it was. In movies, the would-be target always pitches himself left or right but I just stood there for several long seconds before the echo of the bullet whining past me made me realize what happened.
Only then did I move, running into the barn to warn Lisa but she already knew that something had happened.
Lisa is a tall, slender girl with the dignified appeal of her mother. You wouldn’t call either of them beauties but in their fine blond hair and their melancholy brown eyes and their quick and sometimes sad grins, you see the stuff of true heartbreakers, a tradition they inherited from my wife, who broke my heart by leaving me for an advertising man when Emmy was nine years old.
“God, that was a gunshot wasn’t it?”
“I’m afraid it was.”
“You think it was accidental, Grandad?”
“I don’t know. Not yet, anyway. But for now, let’s stay in the barn.”
“I wonder if Mom heard it.”
I smiled. “Not the way she sleeps.”
She put her arms around me and gave me a hug. “I was really scared. For you, I mean. I was afraid somebody might have — Well, you know.”
I hugged her back. “I’m fine, honey. But I’ll tell you what. I want you to go stand in that corner over there while I go up in the loft and see if I can spot anybody.”
“It’s so weird. Nobody knows you out here.”
“Nobody that I know of, anyway.”