Except for the final few: Then you are no son of mine.
Clarity.
The end.
“You okay?” Linda’s voice.
“I’m okay,” Jimmy says to Linda.
She sits at the table with her own cup of tea. Usually she sits opposite him. They have always looked unflinchingly into each other’s eyes to speak of important things. Now she sits to his right. Nearer to me, Jimmy thinks.
He appreciates this. He puts his hand on hers. She puts her free hand on top of his. But only for the briefest of moments. She rushes the gesture. She pats him there and takes both hands away, arranges her cup of tea into some imperceptibly precise position before her. She lifts the cup and sips.
Jimmy does not notice any of that. He’s standing at a pay phone outside a diner on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo, New York. He and Linda have been handed off by the New Orleans Draft Resisters to the Buffalo Resistance and they are about to enter Canada forever. It is July of 1968. Jimmy graduated from Loyola in June. It has been five months since the North’s Tet Offensive showed Walter Cronkite and therefore American television and therefore, at last, any right-thinking Americans what was really happening in Vietnam. Jimmy’s student deferment is no longer renewable. His induction is imminent. He and Linda are ready to leave. They will go into Canada as visitors and stay as landed immigrants and eventually become Canadians and this is their last hour in the United States.
His parents will find out eventually, he supposes. He doesn’t give a damn how his father hears. But he gives a partial damn about his mother, enabler of William Quinlan though she be.
So Jimmy is dropping quarters into a phone and calling the house on Third Street.
His mother answers. He says what he must, and things clearly are hurtling toward a final good-bye. Before he realizes his mother has fallen silent not from lovingly conflicted emotion but for this other purpose, she has put his father on the phone and the man says, “Your mother is crying.”
“I’m sorry for that,” Jimmy says.
“What the hell are you doing?” his father says.
Jimmy finds that the prospect of even speaking the words to this man makes his mouth clench. That he and his father have not spoken of Vietnam since Labor Day — have hardly spoken at all — makes him confident this is true: “You know what I’m doing.”
That William Quinlan is making no reply confirms it.
The silence ticks on, filled with long-distance static and now a distant car horn and now Linda’s hand falling upon Jimmy’s shoulder, squeezing gently there, and remaining, remaining as he waits for a last few words that surely will come.
And then they do, though more simply than Jimmy expected, and therefore more final.
His father says, “Good-bye then.”
And through the thousand miles of telephone wires comes the click that was the last sound from his father through the forty-six years since.
Jimmy sees the pines, as if he has just opened his eyes from sleep.
He looks at Linda.
She is staring into her cup of tea.
Jimmy looks at his own cup.
So.
He picks up the cup. Sips.
Puts the cup down. The faint tap and scrape of china upon china.
“I wish I could help you,” Linda says.
He looks at her.
Her eyes hold on him now.
“Why do you think you need to help me?” he says.
Something seems to release in her. A tension he did not notice. She nods.
“Why do you think you can’t?” he says.
She sniffs. Looks at her teacup. Drinks from it.
“You and your father,” she says without looking at him. She says no more. That is answer enough for both questions.
He studies the tree line.
He senses how comfortable he and Linda are together. At last. For how many years of their marriage would this event have prompted a spirited conversation, a recitation of shared beliefs, a problem-solving debate about families and politics and ethics. A loving, respectful debate, but a debate.
Now they are quiet.
From that sense of comfort he feels he needs to reassure her. “I’m fine,” he says.
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
“Of course,” she says, as if reassuring herself this could be true. “After all this time.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Good,” she says.
And they are quiet for a few moments more.
Then Linda says, “Then can I ask a favor?”
They are looking at each other again.
“Of course,” Jimmy says.
“Don’t let your father’s situation get you started,” she says.
One debate topic has not dissipated with their long-accumulated closeness, one that began only a couple of years ago. He has already ceased to speak of the subject. He’s told her he has. She doesn’t need to lean on it at this moment.
Thinking these things, he remains silent for a few beats.
She clarifies, unnecessarily. “Your recent interest in a supposed afterlife.”
Jimmy thinks: Ah, my darling, you are still young, as you have once again begun to seem. You still have faith in nothingness. And he hears himself beginning to debate her in his mind, where he concedes: I envy you your faith. It is worse to wonder.
Linda says, “I’m sorry. That sounded harsh. Particularly under the circumstances.”
“No,” he says. “It’s all right.”
She nods. And she seems to be waiting. For what? He’s absolved her for harshness. He has already pledged to keep his thoughts on this subject to himself. He says no more.
She says no more.
They drink their tea and then, side by side, carry their cups and saucers to the sink.
Darla parks in front of the nineteenth-century brick opera house just off Monticello’s traffic circle. In the center sits the Jefferson County Courthouse, in the Classic Revival style of the town’s namesake. She crosses the street and turns to her left to circle the building, her eyes on the monument for the Confederate dead at the north side. From this approach, only its eight-foot base is visible beyond the waxy, evergreen crown of a century-old magnolia.
She has come here to fight against her mind. The semiotician part — studying signs, the signifiers and the signified — is prone to jargon-driven incomprehensibility; the art scholar part — studying created objects — can easily be stricken aesthetically blind. Both parts constantly threaten to cut her off from fundamental human life as it is lived, first and foremost: in the moment, through the senses. Not that she doesn’t love her mind. It is always quick, for instance, to see a good irony, such as this very distrust of her mind having itself begun as an idea. And it was her analytical self that challenged her to look more deeply at these monuments, issuing the challenge in this very town after she and Robert came here with friends for roadhouse food and antiques and found this relic of Old South, lost-cause passion and laughed at its excesses and, yes, at its unintended semiotics.
To give voice to this monument’s signified meaning, both in its own era — the last years of the nineteenth century — and in this era, she needs time to stand and meditate on the thing. She is convinced that at the deepest level its meaning is essentially a meaning of the body. Of the bodies of this monument’s creators. The bodies of the women of the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Jefferson County, Florida, and of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.