A Man of His Own

by Susan Wilson

  “Just under one hundred. Let’s see if we can knock it back with an aspirin.” Keller tips a couple of Bayer into his hand and hands them to Rick.

  “Where’s Francesca?” Rick has that bleary look of someone who has just awakened from an unscheduled nap.

  “You remember. She’s off to Sid and Clarissa’s to see the baby. They got back last night from their trip to Iowa.”

  “Right. What did they call it?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s a girl.”

  “Sid’s probably a little disappointed.”

  “Why?” Keller hands Rick a glass of water freshly poured from the pitcher on his table.

  “Not a boy. Doesn’t every man want a boy?”

  “I guess so. Never thought about it. Is that what you would want?”

  Rick hands the glass back to Keller. “No. It wouldn’t have mattered to me. Although I suppose I did imagine having a son. Someone I could teach to play ball.”

  Wouldn’t have. Keller hears the past tense. “I played some in school. We had one teacher there who was a pretty good coach. Of course, they collected all the bats and counted them before we left the diamond.”

  “Were you any good?”

  Keller straightens the sheet over Rick. “I could hit if the ball was thrown right at me. But we had one kid, big ugly guy, he could hit. Couldn’t run worth a damn, but man he’d pound those balls right over the fence.” Ralph Patterson. He hasn’t thought of the man-size boy in a long time. School bully. Far and away too old to still be in reform school.

  Keller is finished in Rick’s room, but he wants to keep the subject of baseball going, to press on and see how long it takes Rick to close down. “The Little League team here in town had a pretty good season. Bet they’d love some attention from a former pro. You know that their field is at the end of the street.”

  At first, Rick doesn’t say anything, and Keller figures he’s pushed a little too far. “I don’t think so. You don’t learn anything from a fool.”

  “What?”

  “A fool. A man who believes that he can strike out the enemy with a live grenade.”

  “You do remember, don’t you?”

  “Oh, I remember. Francesca doesn’t think I do, but I do. Not everything, of course, but I have a very clear recollection of my colossal error. Hubris. Do you know that word?”

  “Yes.”

  “We didn’t have the advantage of a dog like Pax. So my squad was surprised by a machine-gun nest. Pinned us down on the edge of a cliff. They were above us, and we were sitting ducks, as they say. From our angle, we couldn’t get a bead on them.” Rick’s fingers are flexing, catching the blanket, releasing it in an unconscious gesture.

  Keller keeps still, as if he’s afraid he’ll spook Rick out of telling his story.

  “I got the bright idea I could pitch a grenade up high enough that it would land in the middle of the nest. Absolutely confident in my right arm. High and fast. Really high. Almost ninety degrees high. Like standing at the pitcher’s mound and hoping to hit the moon straight up.” Rick pauses, gathers his words, and Keller understands that this is the first time Rick has ever told this story. It’s like he’s tasting it, feeling the words for how painful they might be. In a moment, he continues. “They told me I couldn’t. I’d have to expose myself, and there was no way I could do that without standing straight up. I had a grenade in my hand. I remember juggling it in my fingertips, as if I were looking for the seam, like you do with a baseball. I figured I could find the right position, that sucker would sail. Knuckleball? Sidearm? I wasn’t top at either of those, but I had a killer curve, and that’s what I was going to throw. Literally pitching for our lives.”

  Pax utters a soft whine. He’s left his basket and is standing between Keller and Rick. Pax has his eyes on Rick and he drops a big paw on Rick’s blanket-covered leg. Keller reaches out to touch the dog but pulls back.

  “I juggled that grenade, adjusted my grip. What I failed to realize, or take into account, was the fact that a true pitch requires the whole body. I was betting our lives on my arm. An arm is only as strong and accurate as the kick. Up against the rock wall, on that narrow ledge, I didn’t have room to kick. I pulled the pin and threw the grenade as hard as I could. Gravity is a bitch. Fucking thing came right back down and I stood there like an outfielder, ready to catch it.”

  “Holy shit. You caught it?”

  “I did.”

  * * *

  Keller slips his hand into his pants pocket and feels the edge of the envelope and, not for the first time, he wonders if, had that first letter from Miss Jacobs reached him at the retraining center, would it have changed things? Despite his adamant promise to himself that he would never return to Clayton Britt’s house, would he have gone if he’d known about Clayton’s illness? Was there in him, postwar and undirected, a vestigial decency? After all, he’d had no other place to go at the time. No. It wouldn’t have been an act of compassion for Clayton. If Keller had thought for a moment about it, it would have seemed like an answer to his desire to keep Pax. He might have left the retraining center with Pax in his car and disappeared north, not doing the right thing in bringing Pax here, never meeting Rick. Never knowing Francesca. Keller simply can’t imagine not being here. It’s as if his whole life has condensed down to this small house. Far from feeling trapped, he revels in the freedom. For the first time in his life, he is safe, well fed, and as close as he’s ever come to living with a family. A real family.

  Miss Jacobs was right: She was sticking her oar in. What does she know about it, about the way Clayton used him? What does he owe Clayton anyway? Why should he owe him anything? Didn’t he pay for Clayton’s guardianship in hard work? Clayton was a stage in his life, that’s all. Something he’s overcome. If Clayton hadn’t claimed him, he might have ended up like Ralph. Unwanted, a man in a reform school.

  The people he owes allegiance to are right here. This man needs him, and so does she. And he needs them. Keller never felt connected to Clayton, not like he does with these folks. It sends a little shock wave down his spine, this realization that he has never been happy before.

  “Do you want me to find the latest Life? I think I left it upstairs,” he says to Rick now.

  “No. I’m just going to take a little nap.”

  “Again?”

  “I’m just so tired.” Rick does look tired, more gray than pale, dark circles beneath his eyes, and his skin looks rough and aged. He looks like an old man. This story has been hard to tell, and hard to hear. So many men died because of mistakes. Blown off the edge of the cliff, Rick may have lost his pitching arm and broken his spine, but he also lost his entire squad. Keller gets it now, Rick’s despondency. His darkness.

  Pax noses Rick’s hand, which is draped over the side of the bed. Keller watches Rick’s fingers find the dog’s comfort spot, just the inside of his ear. Pax closes his eyes in ecstasy as Rick rubs the little whorl. Pax reaches with one paw and draws Rick’s hand to his mouth and licks it with a gentle tongue.

  “Hey, Keller?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t say anything to Francesca. Please.”

  “I won’t.”

  * * *

  Miss Jacobs’s second letter can contain no good news, and Keller is pretty certain he knows what’s in it. He hasn’t written her back after her first letter, where she told him about Clayton’s illness. He doesn’t know how to say that he cannot, will not, go back to Hawke’s Cove and take care of the old man. He just can’t. Especially now. He has two other people to care for.

  Dear Keller,

  I wish that I had heard from you before I had to send this letter, but I haven’t, so I don’t know if you will be shocked to hear that your uncle passed away last night. He was stubborn to the end and wouldn’t go to the hospital. But he wasn’t alone. I was with him. You probably don’t know that Clayton and I go back a long way. Or maybe you just never imagined that the schoolmarm and the fisherman might once have be
en young.

  The funeral is Saturday. I hope that you’ll attend. You were his only living family, Keller. He wasn’t an easy man, God forgive me for speaking ill of the dead, but I am certain that he loved you.

  Saturday. Tomorrow.

  Out of the question. Rick isn’t well, and there is no way Keller is going to leave him to Francesca. It’s a four- or five-hour drive or a long train ride. He can’t be gone all day. Anything might happen.

  I am certain that he loved you.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Pax didn’t like it, not one little bit. Keller had gone away. It was different from the usual gone away, which generally meant that he was to keep guard over Rick until Keller came back. This time, Keller carried things that belonged to him out of the house. This was not good. Pax whined and paced from sickroom to front door, literally putting himself between Keller and the outside, as if Keller was about to step off a cliff.

  “It’s okay boy. I’ll be back later.” Keller ruffled up the dog’s fur and thumped him on the ribs, but that didn’t make Pax feel any more secure about this strange turn of events. Francesca patted Keller on the shoulder like she sometimes did him, but Pax didn’t see praise in the touch, more like the way a mother dog pushes a pup away from the teat.

  “We’ll be fine, Kel. Don’t worry about us. You need to be there.”

  Pax didn’t understand Francesca’s words, only that she was exuding a fear scent even as she was making those sounds that the humans communicated with. His comprehension of their vocabulary was much better than their understanding of his vocabulary, but he still didn’t quite get what was going on.

  “I’ll be back in the door by nine tomorrow morning at the latest. Anything happens, you call Sid. Okay, promise me?”

  The pair stared at each other, standing so close, Pax couldn’t hope to fit between them. Francesca made that gesture of placing her lips against Keller’s cheek. It wasn’t quite like the submissive gesture of a supplicant to a pack leader, chop licking; and not quite charged enough to be a sexual overture, but there was a radiant warmth that exuded instantly from both of them that made him study their faces for a clue as to what it meant.

  Keller squatted in front of him, stared Pax in the eye like the leader he was. “Watch out for them.” These words, the dog understood.

  From Rick’s room came the nearly inaudible sound of a man’s fingers brushing against the bedsheet. Pax knew even before the humans could detect it that Rick was warm. Not the warm of comfort, but the warm of illness. He could smell it on him, this illness. A faint but growing trace of infection deep within his body. Keller shut the front door and Pax trotted to his post, but he didn’t curl up in his basket. He placed himself beside the bed, where Rick remained despite the sunrise. He rested his long muzzle on the bed and closed his eyes as Rick’s agitated fingers found his ears.

  Keller had left and taken his belongings.

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Rick and I had both sworn to Keller that I could get Rick up, but when I went in to him, he was asleep again. The dog, who had made such a fuss about Keller’s leaving, was sitting there in his usual place beside the bed, and there was something in his posture—his attention—that chilled me. I put a hand on Rick’s forehead. His eyes opened and he smiled at me, then waved me away. “Just let me sleep at little more. I’ll call you when I’m ready to get up.” I knew that getting up was a process for him, and for anyone helping him it was strenuous and a struggle against indignity for both parties. I’d done it alone for so long before Keller’s arrival. Now, having had help for these past few months, I dreaded it, so I was just as happy to let him stay there.

  I sat in the kitchen and drank a second cup of coffee. Keller’s breakfast plate was still on the table, a film of egg yolk clashing with the white. He had been so torn about this funeral. I really didn’t know why he told me about it; he could have just kept it to himself and not gone if it was that difficult a thing to do, but he’d told me that he’d received word his uncle—great-uncle—had died and he should do the proper thing and go up to Hawke’s Cove to the funeral. He wanted me to ask him not to. He gave me every opportunity. “I don’t have to go, Francesca. I really wasn’t close to him.”

  “Keller, he was your family. It will look odd if you don’t go.”

  “To whom?”

  I smiled at the grammar. Keller was excelling in his English class. “To the lady who wrote to you. Miss Jacobs? The one who gave you the book, right?”

  “So you’re saying I have to take a day off so that I don’t disappoint Miss Jacobs?”

  “Or yourself. He might not have been easy, but…” There it was, my tendency to speak before thinking, and I stopped myself.

  “He took me in. Ergo, I should be grateful?”

  “I suppose.” Standing over him, I poured him a little more coffee. He smelled of his shaving soap, of the castile shampoo that he used. His hair wasn’t slicked back yet and I noticed a little whorl at the crown, like a little kid’s. I resisted the urge to comb down the unruly cowlick with my fingers.

  I’d seen the letter. Keller had shown it to me the night before, handing it to me at the top of the landing before we headed into our rooms. It made me a little sad, wistful in an odd way. The schoolmarm and the fisherman. Was there a romantic story of unrequited love in between the lines?

  I set the percolator back on the stove. “We’ll be fine. Go pay your respects.” After all, what else could I have said? Don’t leave me alone with my husband?

  So he’d gone, and here I was, sitting at my kitchen table, wishing he hadn’t. I had lost a buffer I hadn’t known he’d been providing. A buffer between me and the hard reminders of my husband’s condition. When Rick hadn’t called me before noon, I went in to wake him up, thinking that he simply shouldn’t be sleeping all this time. Pax was still frozen in that alert pose. When I went in, he turned his head and looked at me, and if a dog could ask for help, this one was.

  Rick was burning up. I ran water into a bowl and placed the wet, cold cloth on his head. This woke him up, and he stared at me as if he didn’t know me. I stripped off his blanket and examined his catheter, then called the doctor.

  We had been so careful, but in those days, we had only those clumsy rubber gloves that required boiling. There was no hope we could simulate sterile conditions in a made-over den. I can’t remember the doctor’s name. Isn’t that odd? He must have visited us forty times, and to this day, I can’t recall anything except the fact that he always smelled like clove. Like maybe he was chewing it to mask the odors his profession subjected him to. At any rate, this doc, whatever his name was, shook his head when he came out of the room. “I’ll call the ambulance.”

  It wasn’t the first time this had happened, so the sense of the bottom falling out from under me was only mild. I knew what to do, what to pack, how long it would take, and I projected myself ahead to the happy moment when Rick would suddenly be better, alert and sorry that he’d caused so much trouble. I wanted to get to that part right away. Keller had said to call Sid, but there was nothing Sid could do, and, besides, he was needed at home. Clarissa was a needy mother. Besides, I didn’t want Sid. I wanted Keller. I needed him to tell me it was going to be all right, that things were under control.

  Pax seemed to know exactly what was going on. He didn’t get in the way; he didn’t whine. He watched from out of the way, sitting on the staircase as the ambulance crew came in with the stretcher. Maybe he’d seen this before, on the battlefield, the medics transporting the wounded to ambulances. I knew that Keller had been wounded. Had this dog witnessed him being lifted away?

  I buttoned my coat and searched for my gloves. All that time, the dog sat still, patient and calm. All of a sudden, I realized that I was, too. That things were under control. I stroked his head from black nose to ears and kissed him. “Such a good boy.”

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Keller has inadvertently taken the local, so his journey to Great Harbor is pai
nfully slow, interrupted every few minutes with pauses at outlying stations along the route. The slowness of the journey is actually not a bad thing. He’s in no rush to get there, to go through the motions of the funeral and the pretense of caring, but he’d make darn sure to get the express on the return trip. He’d called Miss Jacobs to let her know he’d be there but hadn’t prolonged the conversation much beyond telling her which train he’d be on and that he’d get Great Harbor’s only taxi to take him to the funeral home. No religion for Clayton Britt, not at this late date.

  He’s got a paper cup of coffee cooling in his hands and a cruller in a bag on his lap. Every now and again, he reaches into the bag and breaks off a piece of the cruller. He’s being careful not to get crumbs on his suit. Rick’s suit. He’s wearing the striped tie of fashionable width that the Stantons gave him for Christmas. He runs his hand down it every now and again to make sure that it’s still in place. Keller has his reading assignment beside him on the seat, but he can’t make himself pick it up. He just watches out the window as the urban landscape begins to give way to country, but he isn’t really paying attention to the scenery.

  A funny thing happened a week ago and Keller is still thinking about it. He was out shoveling the walk when one of the neighbors ventured over. This was a guy he’d waved to a couple of times, a businessman who kept long hours, coming home after five and leaving just as Keller was taking Pax out for his morning walk at sunrise. Early train into town, late train home.

  “Hey neighbor.” It was a Saturday, and the guy was dressed like Keller, ready for chores. “Bob Tuthill. Insurance.”

  “Keller, Keller Nicholson.” Keller jabbed the shovel into the snow, put out his hand. He didn’t have a ready job title to toss back.

  “Nice to have you folks in the neighborhood. Sorry I haven’t been by before this, but you know how it is,” Tuthill said.