I felt no pity for him. I knew what he thought of me, and so I returned a judgment just as harsh, brooded on how little he’d made of his life, how dry and loveless he was, a crude old man who deserved even less than he’d gotten. It is a freezing thing to know that you can never rise in your parents’ estimation, that something at the very core of you fills them with contempt, and after Waylord I lived in that icy world, giving my father as little as I could, caring for him as I would have cared for a dog, though with less affection, and no joy, waiting in anxious anticipation for his approaching death.
Even when we talked, I kept our conversation limited to the most inconsequential matters. Archie disappeared from my conversation, as did my mother. Waylord vanished as well. There was no more talk of Lila. Betty Cutler ceased to be, along with Deidre Warren. Since I was no longer involved with Lonnie Porterfield, he also fell out of our discourse, along with his father, though I sometimes saw them both, Lonnie striding down the main street of Kingdom City, the old sheriff seated like an aging potentate beneath the large oak that shaded his vast lawn.
I had banished all these people from my life, banished them along with my father, determined that I would never again let any one of them cast even the most trivial judgment on my character or the nature of my life. I wanted to erase them like chalk from a board. For a time I even believed I had.
Then, on a bright Sunday morning, when I was sitting in my bed, I heard my father tramp down the corridor, and seconds later the rap of his knuckles on my door.
“Come in,” I said dryly.
The door opened, and to my astonishment, he stood before me, fully dressed in a shiny black suit, shaved for the first time in more than a week, his sagging face slick and glistening in the morning light, his body reeking of aftershave.
“Juanita died,” my father said in a tone that was incongruously cheerful. “You know, that old Indian up in Waylord.”
“Juanita Her-Many-Horses,” I said, remembering the last time I’d seen her, a ragged old lady seated on cinder blocks, fanning herself with a mortuary fan.
“That’s the one. Found her yesterday. Laying in a pigpen. Been there for days. Damn old pig ate some of her.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Heard it on the radio,” my father answered. “They’re burying her today. Had to do it fast, I guess, ’Cause of the shape she was in.” He ran his fingers down the lapel of his jacket. “Figured I’d spruce up and go to the funeral.”
He made a slow turn, like an aged dancer, shrunken but not entirely graceless in his scarecrow suit. “What do you think?”
When I didn’t answer, he cocked his head to the left, glimpsed himself in the mirror on my bureau, regarded himself approvingly. “They’s always lots a females at a funeral, you know. I’m not that bad-looking for a feller that’s dying.” He fingered the cracked brown belt that held his trousers. “Fact is, that’s the best thing about me. From a woman’s point of view, I mean. That I ain’t gonna be around that long.”
“You’re not serious, are you?”
He laughed. “Not about courting,” he said lightly, his tone still oddly bright. “But I’d like to go to Juanita’s funeral.”
“I didn’t think you knew her.”
“I didn’t know her all that well,” he admitted, “but I thought I might see Betty Cutler. They was close, her and Juanita. She’ll be at Juanita’s funeral. Figured I’d say hi, you know, one last time.” His eyes glinted softly, and in them I could see the fading sunlight of his days. “You’d drive me up there if I asked you to, wouldn’t you, Roy?”
I had no desire to return to Waylord, to see Betty Cutler or Lila, and yet, for the first time in weeks, I did feel something, though perhaps it was nothing more than acknowledgment of the inexplicable hold our fathers have over us no matter how much we wish to escape it.
“All right,” I said with a shrug. “I’ll drive you up there.”
“Funeral’s at eleven,” he told me. “We should probably be on the way by ten.”
He turned to leave the room, then stopped, and shifted around to face me once again. “I done something, you know. Done it this morning while you was sleeping. Something I ’spect you might be interested in. Come here, I’ll show you.”
I reluctantly rose from my bed and followed him.
“There it is,” he said when we reached the kitchen.
He pointed to a gallon jug on the table. At the bottom of the jug, several cockroaches spun about madly, antennae frantically probing the glass wall, seeking a way out.
“I’m starting with five of them,” my father said. “If I outlive all five, then I’ll get me some more.” He saw the puzzled look on my face. “It’s like an experiment,” he explained. “Science.” He picked up the jug and turned it toward me. “See, I poked airholes in the lid there. Sprinkled sugar and water on the bottom of the jar. Figured that ought to give them enough to eat and drink. You know, for a normal life.”
“A normal life? In a jar?”
“Well, it ain’t no better for them on the outside. Matter of fact, it’s probably a lot worse. What with birds after them all the time, and snakes. Hell, they don’t have to worry about them things inside the jar.”
“They’re insects, Dad. I don’t think worry enters into it.”
He returned the jug to its place on top of the refrigerator. “Anyway, I’m gonna keep ’em in the shade, make ’em nice and comfortable. It’s cool up there. They’ll enjoy it. Living in that jar.”
“What’s this all about, Dad? This experiment?”
He looked curiously exposed, like someone who’d inadvertently revealed a small portion of himself that he’d long kept concealed. “I had an interest, you know,” he said. “Things in general, I guess. Science, you might call it. Read a book or two about how things work. How things is put together. They had this school they was building just over the county line. Sort of a science school I heard about. So I figured I might-” He stopped, thought better of what he’d intended to say, then retreated into a grin and headed for the refrigerator. “Hell, I’ll set ’em loose,” he said.
“No, don’t,” I told him not only quickly but with a quickening, a small surge of feeling not for my father, but for the ghostly boy his words had conjured up. “We’ll keep an eye on them.”
“Conduct an experiment,” my father said, watching me closely. “Ain’t that how you say it?”
“Yes, it is.”
He smiled. “Okay, Roy, we’ll conduct us an experiment.”
I made bacon, eggs, even a portion of the red-eye gravy I remembered him liking when I was a boy. It was little more than grease and bits of bacon, but he sopped it up with relish.
“Mighty good,” he said after he’d raked his biscuit through the last of it. “Mighty good, Roy.” He wiped his mouth with the dishcloth he used for a napkin, downed what was left of his coffee, then pushed his plate away and got to his feet. “Let me know when you’re ready to go.”
I spent the next hour reading in the chair beside the window, glancing out occasionally to observe the withered garden my father had planted, then abandoned. Several years before, he’d gathered my mother’s clothes and burned them in a pile as ragged and disordered as his marriage. I’d watched him as he’d poked the smoldering mound with a crooked stick. I would not have given him another year of life back then, but he’d staggered on, as if determined to prove just how little nourishment his soul required. If that were true, then I wondered if this same bleak goal might be my true inheritance, not my father’s withered garden, nor his worthless house, but the grim feat of showing just how little a man needed to survive.
He was waiting by the car when I came out at ten sharp. He’d changed his appearance slightly since breakfast, added black shoes to the ensemble, not exactly polished, but wiped with a wet cloth. He’d changed his tie so that it now hung like a thin red snake, its arrowhead tail dangling a full three inches above his belt buckle. A heart-shaped tie clasp held it
in place, the one part of his attire I’d never seen before.
“Well?” he asked as he got to his feet. “Do I look good enough to go courting?”
“It’s a funeral,” I reminded him. “Not a dance.”
He shrugged. “In Waylord them two gets mixed together.” He turned toward the stairs, his gaze suddenly caught on the old brown Ford he’d driven for the past twelve years, a dusty relic whose odometer topped a hundred thousand cheerless miles.
“Would you prefer to drive?” I asked as I stepped up beside him.
“Naw,” he said. “Naw,” he repeated. “You better do it.
I guess my driving days is over.” It was the first time I’d heard him actually give in to the fact of his imminent dependency.
As we headed along the valley roads, my father kept his eyes fixed straight ahead, hardly giving a second glance to the world he’d lived in for so many years. He paid no attention to the farmhouses we swept by, nor the fields and woods that surrounded them.
A mile or so up the road, we passed the house where Archie had done it. A large metal mailbox proclaimed that the Tompkins family now occupied the spacious rooms through which the Kelloggs had once moved with such certainty that they were safe, protected by law and social standing and friends in high places, never imagining that it could all be blown away in a few murderous seconds.
There were children in the yard as we drove by, a little boy and girl, the boy around eight years old, the girl no more than six. They were darting playfully over the neatly cut grass, kicking at a red-striped ball, crying excitedly as the ball hurled toward the road. Get it, get it, get it.
My father glanced at them as we drifted by, and for a moment seemed to see Christmas holly curled around the black mailbox, snow begin to fall softly as it had that night. He released a ragged breath, then turned away, locking his eyes on the road ahead.
He didn’t appear to take note of anything else until we turned onto the red clay roads that twined upward, finally reached Bishop’s Gap, then moved ever higher into the hills. At that point his gaze began to shift about, noting this house or that one, a dell here, a stream there. From time to time he even went so far as to make a comment about the long-past resident of some ramshackle farmhouse. “Old Man Stuckley used to live there,” he’d say, or “Maude Cowper kept bees over yonder. She always brought a jar of honeycomb when she went visiting.”
When we reached the old mining road, I nodded and said, “Down there’s where we found Clayton Spivey.”
We drove on awhile in silence, then my father said, “Did you ever find out much about him, Roy?”
“Just that he was lonely,” I answered. “No wife or kids. Not even any friends.”
“Never found no balance.”
“Balance?”
“Something my daddy used to tell me,” my father said. “That’s a point where things seem about as good as they can get. When there ain’t nothing weighing too heavy on the wrong side of things. That’s what we should look for, he said, this here balance.”
I glanced over to him. “Did you ever find it?”
He lowered his eyes slightly. “Never even got close,” he said. “According to the radio, they’re having the funeral at the Holiness Church. Same church Betty’s husband went to. Buford was his name. A helpless little feller, Betty said. But nice enough.”
I wanted to say nothing, ask no further question, but my need to explore this old corner of my father’s life lit the very candle I thought I’d snuffed out.
“You must have known her pretty well, then,” I said. “For her to tell you something like that. About her husband. What he was like. Something so … intimate.”
My father caught the hint of an insinuation in my tone, but dismissed it.
“Marriage don’t close a woman’s mouth, Roy. Or nothing else, for that matter. If you’d ever been married, you’d know that. Anyway, I never screwed Betty Cutler, if that’s what you’re getting at. We was never nothing more than friends. You think just ’Cause we talked, we had to be screwing?”
“I have no way of knowing.”
He eyed me closely, hit the mark. “You ain’t never been friends with a woman, have you, Roy? Just friends, and nothing else?”
The answer pained me, but I gave it anyway. “No, not really.”
“How about men? You got any buddies out there in California?”
I remembered the rawboned men who’d stood in ragged circles about town, the way they’d parted to receive my father with a clap on the shoulders or a mute, respectful nod, these pulpwood haulers and timbermen I’d seen as little more than work-animals in their dusty overalls and floppy hats. More than anything, I’d wanted to avoid the crude manual labor that had defined their lives. But did some part of me also want to be like them? For they’d had an easy way with one another, as well as a deep competence with physical things. They could tear apart and reassemble engines, mend roofs, build sheds and fences, and I knew that they could truly respect only other men who could do the same.
“Just people I work with,” I admitted. “I wouldn’t call them … buddies.”
My father didn’t say it outright, but I knew what he was thinking. That no matter how unbalanced his life had been, it had never been so bereft as mine, solitary, friendless, a teacher of children who were not my own, surrounded by interchangeable acquaintances, a life lived by the sea, among strangers, in a world where blood was truly no thicker than water.
“Must be mighty nice out there in California, then,” he said. “If you can like it without a friend.”
“I don’t like it,” I told him, speaking with a sudden surprising candor. “It’s just where I ended up.”
My father’s gaze turned toward me. “Well, the house is yours if you ever want to come back to Kingdom County.”
I shook my head. “I won’t be coming back to Kingdom County.”
“Sell it, then,” he said dryly, without the slightest hint of sentiment for the old place. “Won’t bring much, but ain’t nobody else to give it to.”
There were only a few people inside the church, all of them gathered in the first few pews, staring at Juanita’s plain wooden coffin, the handful of wildflowers, stems tied with a white ribbon, that rested on top of it. Betty Cutler sat in the front pew, her gray hair wound into a bun and neatly pinned behind her head. Lila sat beside her in a plain black dress.
My father and I took seats at the back of the church, listened as the preacher said the usual things. After that, a straggling line of people moved down the center aisle, Lila in the lead, holding her mother close at her side.
She caught sight of me as she neared the back of the church, nodded, then moved by, guiding her mother down the front stairs and out to the cemetery.
“Lila’s still mighty pretty, ain’t she?” my father whispered.
“Yes, she is.”
A final prayer was offered at the graveside, then the coffin was lowered into the ground. Lila and her mother stood together, watching silently as the brown casket sank slowly into the earth. Then Lila bent forward, grasped a crust of dry sod, and tossed it into the grave.
Through it all my father held his gaze on Betty Cutler, almost wistfully, as I noticed, the past pouring over him like a glistening falls.
Lila took her mother’s arm and led her over to where we stood.
“Hi, Roy,” she said. “Hello, Mr. Slater.”
“I was sorry to hear about Juanita,” my father said. “How-do, Betty.”
Mrs. Cutler squinted. “Who’s that?”
“It’s Jesse,” my father answered. “Jesse Slater.”
She looked as if she’d been hit by a ray of light. “Well, I’m born again.”
My father smiled. “How’d you like to take a little stroll, Betty?” he asked, his voice so bright and youthful, I glimpsed the vibrant young man he must once have been.
Mrs. Cutler gave no answer, but my father must have caught something in her gaze, for he stepped over briskly, took he
r arm, tucked it beneath his own, and drew her away from Lila and me. For a moment I watched them silently, helplessly, in admiration of my father’s way with a woman, how firm his stride was, how sure his touch, with what ease he’d drawn Betty Cutler back into the circle of his affection.
“Roy?”
It was Lila’s voice, and the sound of it was like a trumpet in my mind.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” she said.
“My father wanted to come to Juanita’s funeral,” I told her.
“He knew Juanita?”
“Not very well. He said he came because he wanted to see your mother. Tell her good-bye.”
Lila glanced out over the cemetery to where my father and Betty Cutler had come to a halt at a small stone near the gnarled trunk of a dogwood.
“Your father always seemed so nice,” she said. “So gentle.”
We watched the old man as he knelt slowly, brushed his hand across the top of the squat gray stone, then peered up at Lila’s mother, who turned away.
“He’s not gentle. Just old and sick.”
A cloud moved across Lila’s face. For a moment, she struggled to keep silent, struggled so hard that when the words finally broke from her, I’d expected them to hit like small exploding shells. But they fell softly instead. “What’s the matter, Roy? You seem so …”
My father’s judgment burst resentfully from my mouth. “Pitiful?”
She looked as surprised by the word as the bitter tone with which I’d pronounced it.
“No, not pitiful,” she said. “Alone.”
I released a brittle laugh. “Well, that’s certainly true.” Then, before she could say more, I added, “I didn’t want that much, you know. When I was a kid. It strikes me sometimes just how little I wanted.” The words flooded out now. “I guess I must have seemed ambitious to you. Full of big ideas. Go to college. All that. But I really didn’t want that much, Lila. Just a simple life. Nothing great, nothing grand. Just a simple life.”
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