“—and your father didn’t?”
“How did you…what reason did you give for him?”
“What reason did you give?”
We wait the question out in silence.
“Didn’t you ever ask yourself…why?” I finally ask. “I mean: he left. Your father left. You and your mother. Weren’t you tempted to wonder if they were ever happy? — your parents?”
“—what does it matter?”
“I think it matters.”
“I think if you think it matters: then, sure. What choice do you have, but to convince yourself that they were happy?”
“Your father still wears his wedding band.”
The Colonel holds his eyes closed a few seconds, then he opens them.
“What was he doing there?”
“—my father?”
“—from Pennsylvania. What was he doing there? In Virginia. In the Park.”
He liked to drive, I try to explain. It helped him think. “He went there once. With my mother. They went there on their honeymoon.”
When they were happy, I almost add.
He stares at the model helicopter.
“Will you go to see him?”
“Pop—?”
Imperceptibly, he nods.
“I drew a map, in case.”
I hand it to him.
“—you drew me a map.”
“To the hospital. To show which entrance you should take.”
“—but you drew me a map,” he repeats and, for whatever reason, my drawing makes him smile, and that smile, I see, is dazzling.
I get there before him to find that Lester isn’t waiting in the hall, so I slip inside the room where Curtis Edwards lies, not so much to see him or to commune with him in any way, but to see if Lester’s with him.
But once inside the room I’m captured by the silent reverence, a sanctity around his body. How small he is. I hadn’t noticed his frailty when I first looked at him a day ago — perhaps because I hadn’t seen the pictures of his former self, robust and smiling for the camera, the shadow of his son’s smile, I recollect. But now the man who made his son light up seems but a shadow, too, a frost of white beard, dusting of fresh snow, across his chin, his blood blue beneath his skin, his lips and fingers fringed in indigo. He is barely breathing and it takes a conscious effort on my part to convince myself that beneath his eyelids there is life. I stand and gaze at him awhile before I realize someone’s watching me from across the room and turn to see Lester in a chair beside the windows on the far side of the second, vacant, bed, so still he’s almost invisible. I go to stand beside him.
“Have you been here all night?”
He nods.
I touch his shoulder.
“You’ve done a good thing.”
“So have you,” he says and inclines his head to point in the direction of the door.
The Colonel has come in.
I had not intended to be present at the moment when the Colonel sees his father but now Lester and I are trapped by the choreography of circumstance and we both freeze, stop breathing, as the Colonel’s gaze barely acknowledges us before focusing on the body of his father.
The Colonel has put on a jacket since our meeting in his office, he’s in full dress uniform, and I can’t help noticing his shoes, those military-issue shoes that always look too shiny for normal use. At over six feet tall he seems to take up all the space beside the bed and he stands at what I have to call ATTENTION for what seems like several minutes until, slowly, I see his edges blur, his sharpness soften like an image in a camera lens deliquescing out of focus.
“Pop—?” he carefully whispers.
Leaning in to look at him, he places both his hands on his father’s legs beneath the blanket.
“Pop, what did you do?”
He waits, as if for an answer.
“What did you do with your life?”
He drops his head as if in search of something in himself and then he goes and gently takes his father’s hand in his and I have to close my eyes. Because this is the moment, in the nation where I live, where we’ve become conditioned to expect the unrealistic ending, the Happy one, where, if this were a movie that my nation routinely makes, the father would return to life, respond, squeeze his son’s hand in his, wake up and reconcile their shattered past, but when I open my eyes again the Colonel is still there, his hand around his father’s unresponsive one, his act of touch a one-way communication, like a prayer, or like looking at a photograph, as empty or as full as visiting a grave. There is only ever one answer to the question what did you do with your life, and it’s the same — fleeting and unknowable — for every one of us.
I lived.
the shadow catcher
Before the Train, the grasslands teemed with herds of buffalo so thick and mythic in their numbers it was said that when they ran they ran as thunder raining on the earth. The men who hunted them could hear them coming miles away, could feel the ground around them shake and rumble with their roar as they barreled past, and maybe that’s the sound I think I hear inside a train, the sound of animals, a sound the living earth once made, a plaint, the sound of history’s demand to be remembered.
Or maybe I just love the sound the whistle makes, that twisted chord, rooted in C major or B minor but ranging, concordantly, some nights, to the uncharted note of the undiluted wanderlust that springs from sadness.
This is, singularly, a North American note, a U.S. of A. site-specific sound.
European trains sound like audible Twinkies, air-infused and artificial.
But an American, running like an unchained herd of half-a-ton horned animals across a plain, well, my friend, that’s show biz, rock ’n’ roll and jazz and ska and rap and Beat and MGM all tied into one:
The sound my nation makes.
And I can tell that Lester is trying to keep me from the road because he keeps bringing up new subjects for discussion.
“My daughter’s coming home tomorrow.”
“Lucky you,” I say. “I’d like to meet her.”
I’m already in the driver seat and he’s standing by the passenger side, in the hospital parking lot. He hands me a business card from his daughter’s craft cooperative through the open sunroof.
“I’ll take her to Clarita’s. Catalogue what’s there. She can give Clarita good advice.” He looks off to the horizon, then continues: “I was supposed to go out to the Paiute reservation this afternoon. See some craft people there. But I’ll go see Clarita, too. She’s upset there won’t be any funeral.”
“Colonel’s decision, Lester.”
“I know…”
He hands me another card on which he’s written his mailing address and phone number.
“You should come and visit. Maybe in the spring. At shearing.”
I blush because I realize I’ve never asked him what he does, how he makes a living, I had committed the classic Anglo thing, consigning Lester to the job of being Indian, as if his race were his profession.
“I farm sheep.”
“—of course you do.” What better shepherd do I know? “I’m great with sheep,” I lie.
He sees right through me, I can tell, because next he says, “You’ll have to change the book.”
I’m not sure what he means until he adds, “The truth about your Mr. Curtis.”
“‘Print the legend.’” I recite.
“Truth is better.”
“—whose?”
He nods in recognition and then tells me, “Some things are not open to interpretation.”