"You're not hurt then?" Daddy asked.
"No, sir," I said. I picked the bottle out of the bilge and held it in my lap, held it close like a promise.
He cranked the engine, turned us around and we set out for the boat launch, The Fish Camp and then the long drive home. We went in silence all the way. It was a mean, greedy kind of silence, and it lasted for years and years.
THE UNYIELDING SILENCE
I
Carla Acres, her small stout body covered in denim and her feet in rough-out boots, stood in the doorway of the room twisting her hands and gazing at the old man lying in the bed. He was sleeping now, thank goodness, but his scratchy breathing, catching and starting, told of a pain that no pill could ease and an exhaustion that only death would release him of. He shouldn't have come here, though she understood why he had and even sympathized with him. It would mean a battle when Warren found out. And how would she tell him when he called; how would she tell him that his father was there, sleeping in the house?
The hallway was dark after she closed his door, so she made her way quickly to the kitchen, always so cold under its high ceiling. With a match she lit the oven and stood before it to warm herself, thinking of supper alone and of what she would say to Warren when he called. She would have to go slowly.
Into a pan she poured her evening soup and set it on the low burner. There, outside the window, loomed the enormous listing barn, illuminated in wavy patches by the mercury light on its pole, up among the trees. She stood still, blinking, wondering, and then, as if something had grabbed her and pulled her out the door, she took her coat from the wall rack and hurried into the night across the frozen yard, through the gate and into the barn, cavernous and harsh-smelling. Old Velvet, her belly swollen, about to foal at any time, whinnied deeply and turned once in her stall as Carla approached cautiously, not to frighten her. She had been nervous and fidgety at feeding time and stared at Carla as if confused by something, wanting an explanation.
"I know, girl," she said falsely, hearing the lie, for she knew nothing of the suffering of motherhood. "It won't be long."
Lady Blue and Buster in their stalls, necks low and stretched over the rails, watched her with concerned, absurdly grave expressions on their long haughty faces and even the cows, chewing and twitching, had gathered in the corner of their shed to be in attendance. What if her time arrived too soon? She had heard the vet was up near Trinity on a bad case that might keep him till morning, and not a single neighbor to rely on. What would she do? Wouldn't it be a shame to lose this one, being registered and all, so valuable. She wished Warren were home, he would know. Such a good man, a proud man, her Warren, with hands that could build or fix anything, hands with a gentle touch.
It was his gentle nature that had first attracted her to him back when she was still at the college over in Huntsville and he was working there in town, before he had asked her to give up the life she had expected, to come live with him on the land. His forty acres. Twelve years now and still each month they held their breath till payday. This work he did for Mr. Hudson that took him away at least one week in five he did to meet the bills, and he did it well. For he too was educated in certain matters, matters having to do with machinery and equipment and the mysteries of chemicals that can transform a building made of wood and iron into a gigantic icebox. No, it wasn't the life she had expected, but she wouldn't change it: not the work, not the worries, not the frigid mornings in the old drafty house, not Warren's moods, not even the rank odors of life and death and decay which were a natural part of a place like this. It was all fine with her. They were a pair for life, she and Warren.
Velvet nuzzled her as if to wake her from a dream and she remembered her other responsibilities.
"Just hold on, girl," she said. "Hold tight."
Outside, in a drizzling rain now, the dogs collected around her for the return trip to the house and this timeit was so cold!she allowed them to follow her into the kitchen. All but that limping mongrel who'd been hanging around despite her curses and hurled rocks. "Go on!" she snapped and closed the door. The four of them sat in a pack, licking, scratching, sneezing.
She peeked in on Mr. Acres but saw no change. Why here; why did he come here? There was something terrible between them, her husband and his father, had been for years, and what an awful chill it brought. She would have to take up for him, the old man, and everything would be difficult then for however long it lasted. And didn't they have trouble enough as it was?
In the kitchen, resting finally, warm finally in her place at the table, she was just raising the first spoonful of noodles to her lips when the phone rang causing her to spill it.
The operator made the collect connection. "Go ahead . . . ."
"Hey, gal." He sounded so happy. "Guess what?"
"What?"
"Be home tomorrow," he said. "And all weekend too."
The idea of saying it out loud seemed to set him off. He talked for a long time about how his work had gone and then went on with questions about the mail and the weather and the animals and giving her advice about caring for Old Velvet on such a raw night. He was excited and glad for the chance to talk to her and she could tell in the things he said and the way he said them that he loved her and wanted like Holy Hell, as he would put it, to be with her just then. It sickened her to have to spoil it.
"Warren," she said to prepare him but he didn't respond and so she said again, "Warren?" as if calling out in the night.
"What is it, Carla?" His voice was light and expectant.
"It's about your father," she said.
II
Sunup was still an hour away when Warren Acres checked out of the motel in Texarkana and headed south on U.S. 59 hoping to make Huntsville and home by lunchtime. The rain had let up in the night and the last of the stars had had a chance to make an appearance, like a thousand gleaming eyes in a black sky so clear and immense it hurt even to glance up at it.
By the time he reached Marshall there was enough of a glow in the east that he could switch off his headlights and quit worrying about every bridge he came to and whether he was going to find himself spinning and sliding and ending up in the bottom of a creek bed somewhere. The fierce wind battered the old Ford and moaned like a demon, slipping in through the wings. A snapping, beauty of a day but so God-awful cold that his knee wouldn't stop tingling and the hair on his neck pricked him like pins.
So the old man's come home, has he. Wants us to make him a place, like a bed for an old dog that shows up just to die on your front porch, or under it, and leaving you with the nasty business of digging the hole to put him in. Well, why should we, why should we bother with him? He's never much bothered with us. Gone for thirteen years and showing up just when he needs something, money usually or a hot meal from Carla, and then taking off again in the middle of the night. Why, he couldn't even be found to attend his only son's wedding, and in his own house that he built with his own hands. He wouldn't have come anyway, with Mother there, but it was the idea of it. He killed her sure enough with his restless ways and his liquor and then running off with that old gal, Shirley was her name, living with her in that stinking trailer house in that stinking town out there in that stinking desert where nothing'll grow but cholla cactus.
And so now she's gone too, and his time up, the cancer eating him alive, and he wants us to care for him. And Carla, with a tender heart for animals, even the human kind, anything in pain, and Carla taking up for him. He's got a right, sure, it was his place his and Mother's, mind you his land, his house, his trees, his debts too, that we took. But it's ours now, ours, free and clear, no matter where it came from. You work a place eleven years and it ought to be yours and it ought to be up to you who can die on it and who can't. It was his, sure, it was, and maybe he's got a right. . . . Better get there, better get home.
He recalled what Carla had said the night before and how her voice on the line went low and deep so the old man wouldn't hear what she said, not that he coul
d have heard much with one ear smashed and silent and the other so weak that you had to holler at him to get his attention. "But he's your father."
And Warren came back: "I don't care, I don't care if he's my patron saint, I won't have him. Not in our house."
"It's his house too."
"No sir, not anymore."
"And just what is he to do?"
"There's Becky. She's his sister, let her take care of him."
"But Warren, that old lady couldn't care for a kitten, she's so weak and senile, and with a bad hip and that Billy of hers still in the house at the age of fifty."
"Then let him go to the poorhouse."
"Warren!"
"I don't see what's wrong with the Veteran's Hospital down in Houston, that's what it's there for."
"But Warren"
"Don't 'But Warren' me."
"But Warren," she said and he let her do it. "Is that where I should take you when the time comes?"
He thought about this for a moment, thought of the way it was with men like them, how they had both gone to their wars and how they had both spent their time in Army hospitals, twenty-five years apart, and how they both received their disability checks each month, the pittance that at least kept them from starving, and how the only thing for men such as them was to end their days among the lonely and ragged within the high inhuman walls of a government institution. And he said, "Yes."
"No, and you know better too," she said. "He doesn't want to die in a hospital."
How was he to argue with her? After another period of silence she mentioned the long-distance charges they were piling up and said they'd better talk about this when he got home.
"I don't want him there."
She didn't answer.
"I'll throw him out," said Warren. "After I have my say."
"Please be careful," said Carla.
He waited, stewing, then muttered, "You too."
"Love you," she said.
"Yes," he said, though he wished now that he had said more.
He was just outside Lufkin, having made better time than he'd expected, crossing the Angelina River bridge, his thoughts already at the house, his boot firm on the pedal. He felt no surprise or shock, only anger over the delay it would cause, when, reaching pavement again, in a deep and long stretch of shade, the truck veered sharply to the left as if under its own control and then spun around on a patch of ice. The tailgate struck the ditch embankment. The impact jostled him but nothing was hurt.
"Why'd you come back?" he said after a moment of stillness.
Then he opened the door and stepped out, into the mud.
III
It was after noon before Warren found a farmer willing to pull him out with his tractor for twenty dollars. The old guy reminded him of his father, with bandy legs in faded jeans and a waist as small as it was the day he became a man, and a dirty mule skinner jacket with corduroy on the collar, and a straw hat with its brim rolled crudely into a funnel at the front, and tennis shoes on his feet, and a cigarette in his mouth. He was still agile, hooking up the chain, but bent and slow.
"You just stand back there, son," the old guy hollered, smiling at Warren from his noisy tractor, the cigarette hanging off his lip. It was then that Warren noticed the rotten brown teeth and the rotten brown cancer splotches on his cheeks and noticed how he even sounded like his father.
"Now you're set, sure enough," he said when Warren handed him the twenty and thanked him. "Happier'n a dead pig in sunshine, I'd bet." He grinned impudently. "Go easy now," he yelled, waving, and started off slowly down the highway.
Chunks of mud rattled against the wheel wells of the truck. Even at two o'clock the sun was low in the southern sky, glaring at him through the windshield, but the ice was gone from the warming road. The pines along the road swayed like dancers in the wind. Warren was colder in his bones than he'd been in years.
He would be lucky now to make it home by dark. Again he found himself driving faster than he should; he wanted to get there. He had things to do, and to say. He had a lot to say. He wanted to tell him one last time what he thought of him and let him know that he would have to pay for the way he had lived and what he had done. Yes, he had a lot to say. And in the morning Warren would drive him to the hospital in Houston and walk him inside and leave him there, and he would be through with it then.
Too bad, really, the way things turned out. They had been close when he was young, a hard-edged older man and his big boy. He would take Warren to town on his errands and he would heft him onto the counter and the other men would tease the boy and the women would smile. Later, when he was older, they hunted together and played pitch in the yard, and later still, in his youth, there were the Friday night football games at the high school and he remembered even now the sound of his father's voice from the grandstand, yelling the loudest, laughing and smiling afterwards, making a fool of himself in front of the others. And there was the night he took the young man to the Tarry Awhile Tavern for the first time and set him down with his first ever taste of whiskey. Warren remembered how tenderly his father had stood over him later alongside the road home, holding him by the neck as Warren retched into the weeds, saying, "That's it, get it all out." And there was, later still, the firm manly handshake and the wet eyes on the day Warren, dressed in his uniform, left for the war, and then the short misspelled letters of encouragement and gossip that he received once a week for three years. He learned even later that his father wrote those letters, never dated, while his mother was away at church on Sunday mornings.
So what had happened? It was true they had never gotten along his father, the local rascal, and his mother, the stern-faced Baptist who quoted scriptures and prayed for his soul but something had changed by the time Warren was home again. There was hatred between them and they all fought about it. Warren knocked him down once after parrying his weak blows and he refused to be helped up. He took his revenge on Warren's mother and there was another fight, mostly shouts and the slamming of doors, and Warren moved to town, and then everything went to hell.
"It's yours," he said one day, meaning the land and the house. He had come into Huntsville where Warren was working then, just to see him. He was dressed up and his own truck was packed with two suitcases, a few boxes in the back. "Tend it for your mother and it's yours when she's gone, as far as I'm concerned."
"You bastard," said Warren.
"You don't understand this," he said.
"I understand you're a bastard."
His father smiled sadly and nodded his head and it was many years before Warren saw him again.
Finally, Huntsville. The house wasn't far now. It was late afternoon and the clouds were back, low and dark. From what he could tell it was getting even colder. Might even snow, the radio said. He hated to go home without something for Carla but he was in such a hurry . . . . At a service station he stopped to fill up the truck on Mr. Hudson's money and on the counter sat some samplers of chocolate-covered cherries. She loved those things. He bought a box; at least he'd have something.
There were two strange trucks in the yard. Coming in the long rutted drive toward the house he recognized one of them. Dr. Sweeney, here to see about Old Velvet. The other was brand new, a fancy job with chrome wheels, parked next to his father's Dodge. Carla, alone, was waiting for him on the porch.
"Where have you been?" she said, pulling the lapels of her heavy coat tight against her chest. "I've been worried to death."
He mentioned the accident, calling it "very minor," and asked her what in the name of reason she was doing out there in the cold. "Just waiting," she said, clapping her gloved hands, and he limped to the bottom of the steps gazing up at her. She looked like the best thing he had ever seen in his life, the essence of warmth, but he knew the look she was offering was meant to put him on his guard. He handed her the box of chocolates, saying, "For you," and she showed him a quick smile before putting it away in her deep pocket. Carla drew him to her then and they sat down toget
her, hands linked in her lap.
"Warren," she said and he cocked his head.
"Warren." It was a warning to prepare himself. "He died this afternoon, just awhile ago. The doctor's in there with him now."
IV
Sometime in the night Warren got out of bed and went into the room where his father had died. The room was chilly, and even chillier when he switched on the bedside lamp, its glow pale and blue. This had been his room when he was a boy and it still held the furniture his parents had bought second-hand or made for him. The narrow chest of drawers and the boy's desk in the corner with its ladder-back chair and the oval rug on the floorboards and the bed with the bookcase headboard in which rested Carla's childhood collection of rag dolls. At first they had hoped this room would be lived in by their own children, but then, over time, it became known as the guest room, though they seldom had guests.
In the corner sat his father's old-fashioned suitcase. Draped over the chair were the clothes he was wearing when he arrived the day before, "coughing like a consumptive and all but falling out of the truck when he opened the door," as Carla had put it. There were his jeans and a western shirt and a corduroy jacket with a cheap furry collar. On the floor sat his boots, the uppers lying on their sides like the wings of a bird. Carla had put out his "personal items" on a towel atop the bureau. A razor and a soap mug with a faded etching of an old sailing ship on the side and a pocket comb stuck into the bristles of a brush. He had always been meticulous about his hair, even toward the end when there was precious little of it left, thin and pearly. He found a ring, a simple gold band, worn smooth, and he wondered if it had been from his mother or from Shirley, the other one.
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