“It had to happen,” Tom Hardin was saying. “He was a dog with style. There’s some dogs you can sit down and teach about the world and they’ll take your word for it, and others that’s got to go and find out for themselves, and Patch was one of the latters. He was bound and determined to see the other side of that river. It was in his blood. I only regret that I never got my hands on one of the pups he fathered on the other side.”
“Now that is not true,” Rose Ella said. “That is not how it happened at all.”
“The way Rose Ella tells that story, Patch sank like a rock. Never even found,” Samuel said.
Tom Hardin folded both hands across the top of his cane. “I never knew a fact that couldn’t be improved with a little exaggeration.”
The family was gathering its scattered belongings. Catherine bundled Tee Junior into the car. Then she stood before her sleeping husband. “The older boys can stay the night here with you,” she said to Rose Ella. “Tell Joe Ray I checked into the motel and I’ll come back to pick them up tomorrow. When he wakes up. If he wakes up.” She climbed into the car and backed from the drive, throwing gravel with her tires.
“Rafe, I don’t know what you did to that poor Handley boy,” Rose Ella said, “but he came up here looking like he’d just seen a ghost. He couldn’t find Frances, said to tell her he’d walk home. And I guess he did.”
“Speaking of the disappeared,” Hippolytus said. “Is Eusebius pulling his vanishing act again?”
“Out looking at the black-eyed Susans, I expect,” Miss Camilla said. She leaned over to poke Tice Flaherty in the ribs. “What about it, old man? When’s the last time you showed somebody a black-eyed Susan?”
“There’s not a single black-eyed Susan within a damned half-mile,” Tom Hardin said.
“Oh, yes, there are,” Miss Camilla said. “There’s a big patch just inside the cemetery gate, right around that little stone bench that Ittybit Muhlenberg put in so people could sit and admire her tombstone. Where kids go to court.”
“Sounds like you know the place pretty damned good,” Tom Hardin said.
“Well, I know it pretty damned well,” Miss Camilla said. “Not as damned well as I’d like, maybe, but not for lack of damned men who tried to show it to me.” She rose, smoothing wrinkles from her skirt. “I believe it’s past my bedtime.”
Tice Flaherty stood. “I’ll walk you across the yard, Miss Camilla.”
Miss Camilla laughed. “I think I know the way. God bless all the Hardins for your kindness, and I hope I hear you out here whooping it up till dawn.” She retrieved her cane and set out across the dew-slick grass.
“Tom Hardin, I don’t think she’s ever forgiven you for getting her that job at the elementary,” Rose Ella said. “You know how some people are—you do them a favor and you’re their enemy for life.”
Tom Hardin heaved himself to his feet. Blinded by the light from the kitchen windows, he walked into Raphael, who seized his father’s shoulders to hold him upright. For a moment they tangled themselves in an embrace, and in that closeness Raphael felt the thinness of his father’s arms beneath his shirt, and his swollen stomach, and he understood this: that Tom Hardin was going, would soon enough be gone.
Then Tom Hardin shook his son’s hands free, stepped around him and inside.
“I think I’ll go start the truck,” Samuel said. “I think it’s past our bedtimes.”
The monks were piled into the truck by the time Eusebius ducked from behind the corner of the house. He jumped over the tailgate to sit in the truckbed. There was much chatter and hoopla—Rose Ella gave advice on avoiding the town policeman, Cyril and Hippolytus argued over the best way to get past the gatehouse. They were gone before Frances rounded the far side of the house, yawning. “Stop on up, Rafe,” she said. “We’d love to see you out at the farm,” and then she was bound for home.
“You’d think she’d at least ask what happened to Nick,” Raphael said, as her truck pulled from the drive.
“I expect she’s used to him taking off on his own,” Rose Ella said. “He’s a odd bird, Nick.”
“Artistic,” Raphael said. “In a word.”
From the dark corner behind the spruce there came a climbing strum of metallic notes. “Why, Mr. Flaherty,” Rose Ella said. “I thought you’d gone home.”
“I just happened to come across my banjo,” he said. He winked at Rose Ella. “Turns out somehow it was right there all along.”
He played a simple tune, old-style—clawhammer. As he sang the wattle at his throat swung back and forth like an old turkey hen’s, and his voice was just as cracked and parched. Raphael recognized the tune, and Rose Ella sang a few words, her voice warbling on the high notes:
She walked through the corn leading down to the river,
Her hair shone like gold in the hot morning sun.
She took all the love that a poor man could give her
And left him to die like a fox on the run.
Like a fox, like a fox, like a fox On the run.
When Tice Flaherty was finished, Rose Ella and Raphael clapped, and he stood to take a grave bow. “Encore!” Raphael said, but Tice Flaherty shook his head. “It’s a poor dog that don’t know when the day is over, and this dog’s day is done,” he said. “I thank you for the hospitality.” He packed his banjo away, stored it on the porch—“Tell Dwight to bring it when he comes”—and walked home.
Through the kitchen windows they could hear the distant clink and clatter of dishes—Elizabeth was at the sink. Out in the yard, under the sugar maple, the murmur and laugh of the card-playing grandsons rose and fell in a stream—an occasional curse stood out like a rock. Rose Ella made the rounds of the picnic tables, the bar, the chairs, the card players, picking up plates, scraping leftovers into a bag for the dogs, stacking plastic cups for washing, unpinning Clark’s flag from the dogwood limb. With everything piled neatly on the carriage rock she tossed one end of the flag to Raphael.
They stretched it out between them, Raphael folding from the stripes, one horizontal fold, then another, then one triangle, followed by another—his hands remembered the routine his head had forgotten long ago.
Joe Ray, still asleep, shifted his weight with a grunt. “I thought I asked you to talk to your oldest brother about his drinking,” Rose Ella said.
“I thought you asked me just the opposite.”
“Well, I didn’t mean for you to come right out and say it to his face. Lord! What a thought.” Rose Ella’s lips drew thin at the notion. “That’s the problem with you Californians—you think everything has to be tackled head-on. Like everything under the sun that people do has got an explanation and if you talk long enough you’ll find out what it is, when the only thing you can really do is give things a little nudge and then hope for the best.” Rose Ella kicked Joe Ray’s foot with her toe. His head lolled to one side. “Like with your brother. You can talk about something without saying it. You can talk to him about his drinking. Just be careful not to mention it.”
“Joe Ray is right,” Raphael said. “I have been in California too long.”
“Well, maybe it’s for the best, who am I to say,” Rose Ella said with a sigh. “All your cards thrown right down, faceup on the table. Problem is, what good does it do for people to put all their cards faceup on the table when none of us is ever playing with a full deck? And I don’t except nobody from that.” She raised an eyebrow and tilted her chin at Raphael. “Not nobody. He’s a lot like you,” Rose Ella said. “Nick Handley, that is. Artistic.”
“For God’s sake, Mother, he runs a tobacco farm.”
“That’s not to say he couldn’t sell it off. If I was as young as you that’s what I’d do. Sell it off, and then head to California.”
“I’m not so young, Mother.”
“Why, thirty-four!” Rose Ella said gaily. “At thirty-four I was carting you around in diapers and I still trapped the best fox in Jessup County.” Her hands shaped the length and heft of that fox. “Not th
at I’m so old now.” She sat with a heave in one of the empty Adirondacks, the folded flag in her lap. She threw her head back and looked up at the stars. “Stop everything right here, please,” she said.
Raphael sat down. “Once, when I was a kid. It was summer, I remember wearing shorts, and that hot light that bounces off the patio into the kitchen. I was standing in the kitchen and you were crying at the table. You had your head down and your shoulders were shaking, you were crying that hard.”
Rose Ella made a little church with her hands—they were remembering Tee Junior, with whom she’d been playing hand games just before Catherine took him to the motel. “Raphael. I know how it is when you get all drunked up and you go out and do some things you just might not otherwise do. I just want you to be careful, is all.” She turned open the church doors to let out the people. “Promise me you’re being careful, out there in San Francisco.”
“Why in the hell didn’t you tell me that twenty years ago?”
“Because I didn’t know the words,” Rose Ella snapped.
“You couldn’t say the words. A different thing entirely.”
“So you’re young, you live in California. You tell me the words,” Rose Ella said quietly. “I’m no fool, even if I do watch TV. I know what’s going on out there. What are the words for all that? What words do you use?”
The grind of the katydids grew louder in the silence that followed. Out in the yard one of the card players let out a whoop. “Shoot the goddamn moon!” he cried.
“Are you sick already?” Rose Ella asked. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
He told her then: he wasn’t sick. Not yet. It would be awhile before he got sick. Awhile? she wondered. Twenty years? Ten years? Nobody knows, he said. Three years? she asked. More likely three years, he said. Or maybe four. And then it would be maybe another year where he would have it under control, like diabetes. And who knows, they might have a cure, or a way to put it off still more, things were changing fast . . . Or he might come back here, that was possible, though it would mean dealing with the local doctors who would be ignorant at best and probably worse than that. He saw himself as having one kind of family here, another in San Francisco; it was hard to say which he’d choose, if it came to that. His friends in San Francisco had experience with this illness; there was a lot to be said for experience. He could speak to that.
All this he said as if it were just news, the latest at his job or the latest book he’d read. It came from some quiet and distant place, the place of the facts of things, which could neither be disputed nor changed but only acknowledged.
They sat for a long while in the Adirondack chairs, adrift on the sea of sounds from the night insects and tree frogs, and over all the whippoorwill’s calling. Finally Rose Ella spoke. “Something about the oldest and the youngest—I know a mother’s not allowed to have favorites but there’s something about the first and last—you can’t help but see them as start and finish. Begin-all and end-all. Punctuation,” she whispered. “Don’t tell me a baby learns everything while he’s growing up. I knew every one of my babies before they were born. You were the quiet one, you just laid there listening until your time come and then you got up and left so quiet you were gone before I knew it.” She picked her words one by one, as if by saying them carefully enough she might get them to mean what she wanted. “Would it have made a difference if you could have told somebody, talked to somebody, back then?”
“What words could I have used? I’d never heard them. You’d never heard them. And even if I’d had the words—who would I have talked to?” This Raphael said not as accusation but as fact, spoken with a dispassion and certitude that silenced them both.
The eastern sky grew light; a gibbous moon had risen, a ruddy egg born from the hollows into rolling clouds. When it rose above the treetops Rose Ella spoke. “What if I had asked, when you got old enough? What if I had sat you down and made up words, if it had come to that? What if I had said, ‘Rafe, how can I help?’ Could I have helped?”
“Could I have helped?” Raphael asked. “That day I found you crying in the kitchen? Could we have helped each other?”
They sat awhile longer. From the ravine rose the churning chorus of the frogs and the voice of the whippoorwill, calling, calling, calling.
Then Elizabeth came to the door. “Last chance for dirty dishes,” she said brightly.
Raphael spoke. “That was the day I learned what it meant to be helpless.”
Rose Ella stood heavily, clutching the flag to her breast. “Raphael, the best thing about memory is that it forgets. I just plain don’t remember.”
“You won’t remember.”
“I just plain won’t remember,” she said dully. She gave the flag to Elizabeth, bent to plant an awkward kiss on his head, then stacked cups and plates and carried them in, her arms burdened like a waitress’s.
These nights Raphael slept in the guest room, in what Rose Ella called her holy bed, where she stowed the religious who were forsaking their vows to reenter the secular world. She’d entertained a steady stream: monks and an occasional priest who in the sixties had tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge when the abbot, innocent as Raphael if forty years older, had thought that exposure to worldly ways would weed out the weak of heart and enrich the contemplative experience of those who remained. By the seventies the abbot realized the error of this thinking and ordered the doors to the abbey enclosure sealed, but like the farmer with his famous horses, too late: The monks who in Raphael’s childhood had sneaked from the enclosure across the knobs to the Hardin house to bum cigarettes and drink beer and watch football on television, those same monks now showed up at Rose Ella’s doorstep at odd hours of the day or night, sometimes smelling of whiskey and always looking for a place to stay for a few days or weeks until they emerged, blinking and shorn of their vows, fearful of and fired by their vision of a new life.
Raphael lay awake (jet lag? it was still evening in San Francisco). His window faced the backyard, where he could still hear the rattle of shuffling cards and the murmur of the boys, interrupted every once in a while with a laugh or a curse. “The cops cut the goddamned buds off before they burned it all.” Dwight Flaherty raised his voice in outrage. “Nobody asks where they went.”
Here in the holy bed Raphael was dogged more than usual by the certainty that he was among those in transit, but not to a new life. Once he had contemplated the prospect that, youngest of his family, he would outlive his generation—attending the funerals, one by one, of his parents, his older brothers and sisters, his in-laws, to be left alone as in her generation his grandmother, youngest of her siblings, had been left alone, outliving all who had known the world as she had. Now he faced instead the likelihood that he would die with witnesses, the numbers of his family in attendance and at the top of the genealogical pyramid Rose Ella and Tom Hardin, dying themselves as he lay dying.
And who would remember him? Who would remember the artistic sons, gone to distant cities to die of euphemisms? Would they—we, he forced himself to think it—be remembered better by our blood families? Or by the families we’d formed in distant cities, families that came and remained together, if and when they remained together, out of love? Was love strong enough to make a family? Or did it take that unbreakable, bloody tie, the generational tie that bound people together above and beyond any single person’s choice?
He thought of Rose Ella singing from the carriage rock, and he understood for the first time that these parties had been hers as much or more than Tom Hardin’s. How much of life would you have to accept, how much grief would you have to know before you could climb on the table and lift your skirts to the world? It was as if a shutter slid open, or a curtain raised to reveal dangling within his grasp the stuff, if not of heroism at least of history, a chance to crash and burn in one glorious public moment. Lying in bed on this hot August evening Raphael was granted a vision of himself as social kamikaze, with the great silence as his target. This was th
e great and terrible gift of his illness. Years later, long after his death, they’d recall him on cold evenings. “Pneumonia,” they’d name it to anyone indelicate enough to ask, or “heart failure”—wagging their heads at the mysteries of life, in which a disease of the old might claim someone so young. And then the children and the refined would go to bed, and the kind that had to find out for themselves would remain around the table, drinking whiskey and asking their questions; the women whose task it was to preserve memory and those men, not the marrying kind (long before their birth, Raphael knew them more intimately than he knew his living brothers), impelled to seek out this skeleton reserved for the strong and inveterately curious of heart.
They were dying—we are dying, even now Raphael had to remind himself again that he was among those men who’d had passion and heart and a curious cock, who were passing into that dim world of those gone before, leaving behind nothing more nor less tangible than the courses of their lives. Raphael thought how the meandering paths of his own life had been shaped and directed by unremembered men and women acting not from highfalutin charity but in simple consonance with their generous selves. “Raphael’s in love,” his co-worker had announced so many years ago, and in her exuberance and joy Raphael had seen the possibility that it could be true even for, especially for, a man such as himself: a man outside of men, a man apart. “You were in love,” Nick had said, and in the longing in his voice Raphael understood that there were many who would never know love, not the love he’d known. Life had not denied him this. Raphael lay still, his hands fingering his undershirt, remembering the tearing, the thin-meshed cotton giving way before that surge of joy and love and lust; ten, eleven years gone by since those days when the low-pitched moan of the balky Southern Pacific was enough to fire his blood, well over a year since his lover’s death and still his blood remembered that love, that lust, and that was something; the remembering was all there was, it was all there could be, it would have to be enough, it was enough.
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