But I can’t do it. Not this time. At the funeral, when the other men who had been Tony’s pastors gave their portion of the eulogy, their words were full of comfort and hope. They were able to assure his family that Tony was in a better place, that he was, in fact, in heaven, with Jesus and the angels, held close to the bosom of God. But when it was my turn, I had no comfort or hope left to give. All I could say was that I loved Tony, and that he loved me, and that he was a stubborn and intractable person, and that I was, too, and that I believed, truly, that Tony had found his greatest joy in watching kung fu movies. That was all I could say. And when I was done, I stepped down from the only pulpit from which I had ever preached a sermon, and I walked past the altar, and down the steps, and down the aisle, and through the back doors of the church, and I have not been back since.
THE TRUTH AND ALL ITS UGLY
1.
THE YEAR MY BOY DANNY TURNED SIX, my wife Penny and me took him down to Lexington and got him good and scanned because that’s what everybody was doing back then, and, like they say, better safe than sorry.
He was a good boy and never got out of hand until he was seventeen years old and we got out of hand together. Around this same time Penny kept saying she was going to leave and stay with her sister in town. She said it enough that we stopped believing her, but the last time she said it, she did it. I remember the day and the hour. Friday, September 17, 2024. Quarter after five in the afternoon, because that’s what time her grandmother’s grandfather clock stopped when I kicked it over.
Danny heard all the yelling, and he came running downstairs and saw her standing there with her two suitcases and looked at me like I ought to do something. “Goddamn it, I’m not going to stop her,” I said.
“It’s your fault she’s going,” he said.
Penny hauled off and slapped his mouth. “I didn’t raise you to talk to your father that way,” she said, and at that moment I was of two minds, one of them swelled up with pride at the way she didn’t let him mouth off to me.
It’s the other one that won out. I reached back and gave her what she had coming for a long time now. I didn’t knock her down, but I put one tooth through her lip, hit her just hard enough so she would come back to us when she was calmed down.
She didn’t come back, though, and she didn’t go stay with her sister, who claimed not even to know where she was. One week, two, then on a Saturday me and Danny had enough. We hauled Penny’s mother’s pink-painted upright piano out the front door and onto the porch and then we pushed it off and picked up our axes from by the wood pile and jumped down on it. “You got to be careful, Danny,” I said. “There’s a tension on those strings that’ll cut you up bad you hit them wrong.”
It was pure joy, watching him lift that axe and drive it into that piano. Up until then his head was always in books or that damn computer. Dead trees, I’d tell him, got not one thing on milkweed and sumac, horsemint and sweet William. But now I wasn’t so sure, and now he’d caught on. “It’s what you do with the dead trees,” he said, like he was reading my mind.
I don’t know what came over us after that, and it’s not enough to blame it on our getting into the whiskey, which we did plenty. Penny had a old collection of Precious Moments figurines handed down from her own mama and grandmom. Children at a picnic, or playing the accordion to a bunch of birds, or hands folded in prayer, and nearly every little boy or girl wearing a bonnet. At first Danny said we ought to shoot at them — we had everything from assault rifles to a old Civil War service revolver that I’d be afraid to try firing — but then one Tuesday morning — by now it was November, and the old dog pens were near snowed under — he found some of the yellowjackets I had caught in glass Mason jars and forgot about. He found them dead in there and I saw him looking at them and he saw me watching but didn’t say anything, just went upstairs and came down with my old orange tacklebox, which was where Penny kept her scrapbooking things.
“You gonna scrapbook those yellowjackets, buddy bear?” I said.
He said his plan was to shellac them. He couldn’t near do it right, and I said, “Here, let me show you how,” and showed him how to thin the shellac with turpentine and dab it on soft with the paintbrush bristles, which was something I knew from when things were better with Penny and I’d help her with her scrapbooks just so we could sit with our legs touching for a while.
He got good at it fast, and then we caught more yellowjackets and did what Danny had in mind all along, which was shellac them stiff, wings out like they were ready to fly, and set them on the Precious Moments figurines in a swarm.
After a while that stopped being fun, and it kind of took the shock away when every Precious Moment in the house was swarmed like that, plus we were running out of yellowjackets. “We got to get more minimal,” Danny said, and I could see what he meant. It’s like when I served my country in the African wars. You get to see enough dead bodies and after a while you get used to seeing them, and then you see another and it don’t mean one thing to you. But you run into one little live black girl with a open chicken-wire wound up and down her face and maybe three flies in her cut-up eye, that gets to you.
So after that, we got strategic. We’d put three yellowjackets right by a brown marbly eye, eye to eye. Or one, stinger first.
Nobody but us had got to see what we had done to the Precious Moments until a few days later when Benny Gil, our postman, came by with the junk mail, and Danny saw him and invited him in for a glass of water, and he saw what it was we were doing with the wasps, and he said, “Son, that’s sick,” but he was smiling when he said it, and it was then I knew he was a person who could be trusted. Up until then, he’d always been asking about my methadone, which I got regular from the pharmacy at St. Claire’s Hospital in town, on account of my back pain. He wanted to get some off me because he could trade it for other things he wanted.
This day I asked him, “Why is it nobody writes letters anymore?”
“It’s a general lack of literacy,” he said, and we started laughing because everybody knew that wasn’t why.
“It’s the government,” Danny said, but he was just repeating what he always heard me say, and I wished he wouldn’t get so serious in front of Benny Gil.
“They’re spying,” Benny Gil said, “listening in on us right now,” but he wasn’t serious.
“Best be careful,” I said, because now was a time to keep it light. “Benny Gil here is on the government teat.”
Benny Gil took a sip of his water and smiled some more. “That one,” he said, “and maybe a couple two or three others.”
Danny caught on. “It’s you we saw across the creek there, in the tall grass.”
“I been watching,” Benny Gil said. He leaned back in the wooden chair, put all his weight on the back two legs. I could see by the look on Danny’s face he was still thinking about how Penny would say not to lean back like that because it could put another divot in the wood floor, which was the kind of not important thing Penny was always worried about. There was a thousand or more divots in the wood floor, and by now another one just added a little extra character.
Benny Gil leaned forward again, put his elbows on his knees so his face was closer to mine. “I know where Penny can be found,” he said.