The Essay A Novel

  “Virgil, you’ve got more grease on you than the engine of this car,” Edgel said. “It’s not my car and I don’t want to take it back all goobered up. Now, get in.”

  He was in the shower for better than an hour and when he finished, it looked like the grease-smudged walls of the Farnsworths’ garage. Virgil cleaned up pretty well except for the grease that remained embedded under his nails and in the creases of his fingers. There was a locally owned steak house—DeLorreto’s—at the far end of the strip mall where they were setting up the carnival and we were seated at a booth near the kitchen.

  Virgil cut into a New York strip that lapped over the edges of his plate on three sides. He used the knife to stab a wedge of meat and fat and jam it far into his mouth until his cheek looked like it was hosting a plug of tobacco. Staring hard at Edgel and me, Virgil said, “So, you’re telling me that right then and there, right after she divorces the old man, she up and marries this one-eyed mother fucker, Cyclone?”

  “Cyclops,” I corrected.

  “Whatever the fuck his name is,” Virgil growled. “That’s a crock of shit. What was she thinkin’, and what the hell’s the old man going to do when he finds out? I’ll tell you what he’s going to do; he’s going to lose his shit, that’s what.” Doing more talking than chewing, he struggled to swallow his beef, and a trickle of pink juice escaped from the corner of his mouth and rolled under his chin. He swiped it with the back of his hands. “How come you ain’t been looking for the old man, or at least called the cops?”

  “And tell them what?” Edgel asked. “That our dad ran away from home? He’s free, white, and twenty-one, Virgil, and he can do as he pleases. Besides, we didn’t know he hadn’t shown up in Florida until a couple of hours ago. He left in one of his goddamn huffs, wouldn’t listen to any reason, and started hitchhiking. The last time I saw him, he was standing on the side of Route 50 with his thumb out. You know what he’s like. What were we supposed to do?”

  Virgil grinned for the first time since Edgel began explaining the situation on Red Dog Road. “He’s prob’ly holed up with some whore somewheres,” Virgil said. “But, I still think you got to fill out a police report when you get back.”

  “Maybe we could call Sheriff McCollough and see what he thinks, but Dad’s a grown man and they don’t usually take missing persons reports unless they think there’s been foul play,” Edgel said. “Just because Nick Hickam got a wild hair up his ass and headed out for Florida might not be a good enough reason.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “I think you should stay as far away from the sheriff as possible.”

  “Good point.”

  We hadn’t yet told Virgil about the sawmill fire and Edgel’s incarceration for questioning. We also hadn’t told him—and didn’t plan to, either —that we were now the proud owners of the Hickam family estate. He would have thrown a royal fit in the middle of DeLorreto’s steak house.

  Edgel offered to get Virgil a room in the hotel for the night, but he insisted that he needed to be on the grounds of the midway that night because he was some type of low-level supervisor. Edgel and I assumed this had more to do with some type of party than it did any level of supervisory status. In formidable Hickam fashion, Virgil would no doubt drink himself stupid and crash under a semitrailer in his sleeping bag.

  The next morning, we took coffee in Styrofoam cups and warm cinnamon rolls from a local bakery to the mall parking lot and spent another thirty minutes with Virgil before pointing the station wagon north, both of us relieved to be putting distance between ourselves and our brother.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  A

  t lunchtime on Wednesday in the school auditorium, I signed a letter of intent to attend Ohio Methodist University on a football scholarship. It was about the biggest day of my life. When an athlete at East Vinton High School earned an athletic scholarship, which wasn’t often, the athletic director hosted a formal signing ceremony so that the entire school could attend. Coach Battershell gave me a royal-blue ball cap with a white interlocking OM on the front to wear at the signing. Most of the school showed up, even Lindsey Morgan and Abigail Winsetter. Edgel sat in the front row of seats with a camera, having taken his lunch hour so that he could watch me sign. The cooks from the cafeteria rolled out a cake that was decorated with white icing and “Ohio Methodist” written in blue, block letters. My teammates gave me a standing ovation.

  I had been recruited by several bigger schools, including Ohio University and Marshall University. However, Coach Battershell really pushed me to go to Ohio Methodist. While he said I was one of the best players he had ever coached, I was a bit small for Division I. “Let’s get you to a school where you can get on the field and have some fun,” he said. Ohio Methodist was a Division II school and it had, according to Miss Singletary, an excellent journalism department, which made both of us happy. The scholarship would pay all but about two thousand dollars a year, which was still a huge amount for me. The admission counselors said they would arrange for me to get loans for the remainder.

  When I walked through the back door after track practice that night, the phone was ringing; it was Virgil calling collect from a pay phone at the mall in Richmond, Kentucky. “Hey, I was just checking in,” he said. “What did the sheriff say about Dad?”

  “Uh, I haven’t talked to him yet, Virgil.”

  “What the fuck are you waiting for? I thought you were going to do that when you got back on Sunday.”

  “Edgel said he wanted to wait a few more days. He said if we filed a missing person report that it would get in the newspapers and that would make Dad furious.”

  “Well, that’s a crock of shit. Who cares what they put in the goddamn paper? Our dad’s been missing for six months and you two fuck wads don’t give a shit.”

  “Look Virg, I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but that’s what Edgel said to do. He’s in charge. If you’ve got a bitch . . .”

  The phone went dead. I set my books on the kitchen table just as I saw the dust kicking up under the tires of the Rocket 88 as it climbed up the drive toward the house. I walked out front to meet him, but he got out of the car and went right to the shed to retrieve his ladder and a one-gallon can of white paint. Over the past week, Edgel had been using every second of daylight to paint the front and back porches and the trim on the old house. The dried wood sucked up the first two coats of base, but once he got the primer to take, the white trim made an astonishing difference on the house. It still listed to one side, the asphalt shingles that covered the house were faded and thin, but it was by far the best looking house on Red Dog Road.

  “Nice ceremony today,” he said, hardly breaking stride as he headed toward the back porch with his painting supplies. “I’m right proud of you.”

  “Thanks for coming. I appreciate it.”

  “Glad to do it, little brother.” He pried open the paint can with a screwdriver and stirred it with a broken piece of a yardstick. After a minute he looked up and asked, “Got something on your mind?”

  “I just got off the phone with Virgil. He’s madder than a hornet because I haven’t reported Dad missing to the sheriff.”

  “Virgil’s got a mouth and access to telephones. If he’s all that concerned, he can file the report.”

  I picked up one of the little trim brushes and began working on the window casing opposite Edgel. I was starving, but not about to disrupt Edgel or his work on the house. After it was too dark to paint, we would scare up something to eat. Edgel dipped his brush and made a clean, neat run along the window casing. His talent for working with his hands continued to amaze me.

  “I’ve been giving some thought to something and I want to bounce it off you,” Edgel said, never taking his eyes off his work.

  “Shoot.”

  “What would you think about selling the house?”

  “Selling the house? Why? Where would we live?”

  “You’re going to be living at college most of the next four years. I do
n’t need this big a place. If we could sell it, it would help you out for college.”

  I was touched that Edgel would sacrifice the house for my education. “What about you? You need a place to live.”

  “That’s no biggie. We put your college money back, and then split what’s left. I’ll use my portion to get a trailer or as a down payment for a little place. People are moving out of Vinton County in droves looking for work. I ought to be able to pick up a place pretty reasonable. Mr. Morgan said he would talk to the bank and get me the loan. We’ll put your half in the bank and you can have it when you’re out of college.”

  I shook my head. “No, that’s not fair. This place isn’t worth that much, and I’d be getting too much of the money and . . .”

  “This isn’t a debate,” he said, cutting me off. “I don’t want you to have any reason not to finish college. I’ve got a good job. It’ll work out fine.”

  “Did you think about the old man? It’s going to be bad enough when he comes back and finds out he’s divorced and Mom gave us the house. What happens when he comes back and finds someone else living here?”

  Edgel continued to paint until he finished a corner piece of the window frame. After resting his brush across the can of paint, Edgel looked at me as if I were a complete puzzle, the last clue in a crossword that just would not come to mind. He looked away, his knuckles digging into his hips, and after a minute walked into the house without a word.

  When he returned a minute later, he sat down on the top step of the porch and with an index finger motioned for me to sit next to him. Something was clasped in his fisted right hand. After I sat down, Edgel extended his right arm until I put an open hand under his. He loosened his fingers and a scorched, oval piece of steel dropped into my hands. It was black and brown, and parts of the burned metal had a rainbow sheen, like oil spread across the water. It was a watch, and its glass crystal had melted into its face, blurring the numbers. In spite of the damage, it was immediately recognizable to me. It was the remains of my dad’s Twist-O-Flex wristwatch. I rolled it around in my hands for several seconds, examining the gnarled lump, unable to grasp its significance. “Where did you get it?”

  “I found it under a couple tons of wet ash in the subbasement of the sawmill.”

  I thought about his words for a moment. “What was it doing down there?”

  “Lying next to what was left of the old man.”

  It was a ridiculously obvious question, but still I asked, “Dad’s dead?”

  “Extremely.”

  “He burned up in that fire? What in God’s name was he doing down there?”

  Edgel scratched the back of his neck and squinted past me to the western hills.

  ‘“What was he doing down there?’” Edgel said, repeating my question in a mocking tone. “If you can’t figure that one out, maybe you’re not college material, after all. The reason he never hooked up with Virgil was because he never left Vinton County. That whole tirade about heading to Florida was just a cover. I suspect he ducked into the woods for a couple of days, then broke into the sawmill to set it on fire to get back at Mr. Morgan.” He looked at me until our eyes met and he had my full attention. “Jimmy Lee, our dad liked fire. He always liked fire.”

  “Always?”

  Edgel nodded once. “Always. He thought that was the best way to get revenge.”

  “Or cover up a crime?”

  “Or that.”

  “Like burglarizing a house?”

  Edgel nodded again, the corners of his mouth curling in a sad grin. “Yeah, like burglarizing a house.”

  “It wasn’t you that burglarized and torched those houses?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not once?”

  “Not ever.” He rested his elbows on his knees and looked away, appearing to blink away tears. “He was hitting the homes of widows and divorced women, mostly. He figured out when they worked, or when they were at church, and hit ’em then. He didn’t always burn them, but he would if he thought he needed to cover his tracks or if he wanted to get even for something. Mrs. Zurhorst, that old widow who lived down by the railroad tunnel, he robbed her place and burned it to the ground because her son gave Dad a beating down at the Double Eagle Bar one night. Ain’t that something? He gets drunk and gets his ass beat, and he burns down some old lady’s house to get even. That poor old woman lost everything and I don’t think she lived another month after that.”

  “But how did you get blamed for them?”

  “Dad bought that Rocket 88 off Rocky Johnson. The transmission was going bad and he threw a rod, and you knew Dad, he wouldn’t spend ten minutes to fix something. He just dumped it out on the hillside with the rest of his junkers. I asked him if I could have it and he started laughing. ‘If you can get it running, you can have it,’ he told me. ‘You won’t get that thing running in a hundred years.’ It took me all of two days and I had that thing purring like a kitten. Once I got the Rocket running, the old man couldn’t stand it. He said it was still his car, and he started taking it out on his bar runs and using it when he was burglarizing houses. Some people had seen the Rocket parked near some of the houses that got hit, so the cops figured it was me. I was drunk one night and put the car in a ditch. The sheriff went through my car and found road flares, Sterno, and some jewelry from one of the burglaries.” He held out his hands, palms up. “Game over.”

  “Dad never told them it was him?”

  “Come on, little brother, you’re not that naïve. Of course he didn’t. He and Mom came down to see me in jail one night and told me that if he came forward that both of us would end up in prison. That was it. Sorry, pal. Keep your mouth shut, do your time, and we’ll see you later.”

  I looked down at the slab of steel, shook my head and asked, “What kind of man does that to his son?”

  “Nick Hickam, that’s who.”

  “So, Mom knew you didn’t do it, too?”

  Edgel nodded.

  I looked out over the property and watched as the sun seemed to balance itself atop Buckingham Ridge to the west. “What did you do with his body?”

  “Remember that night you surprised me at the mill?”

  “Sure.”

  “He was in the back of the truck, mixed in with the ashes. There wasn’t much left; a skull and crumbled pieces of bone. What I found fit in the bottom of the wheelbarrow.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “The inspectors found the propane tanks upstairs had been opened. Mr. Morgan told us that the day we went down there. Propane is heavier than air and it sank into the subbasement. My bet is he opened those tanks figuring once he got the fire started down below that it would fuel the flames. But when he tried to fire it up, probably with one of those road flares, he was standing in a compartment up to his ass in propane. Like I said, there wasn’t much left to bury. He blew himself to pieces.”

  I continued to stare out over the barren hillside, trying to digest everything that Edgel had just told me. “You lost nine years of your life because of him,” I said. “Nine years, Edgel. Did he even say he was sorry?”

  Edgel snorted out a laugh. “Dad? Say he was sorry? Come on, Jimmy Lee, what do you think? He never said he was sorry ’bout anything. He never said he’d make it up to me. After I went to prison, he ran the Rocket until it conked out again. The only thing he did for me was put it up on blocks in the shed and leave it alone.”

  The thought of Edgel sitting in prison for nine years, being portrayed as inherently evil and a pariah by my father, sickened me. The sadness that I had felt when I realized my father was dead evaporated. Rather, I felt only anger and disgust for him and sadness for my brother, whom I had learned to love and respect. I also felt relief in knowing that I would never again stare into my father’s sneering face and that justice—divine intervention, perhaps?—had been served. I fervently hoped that, even for just a fleeting second before he died, in the instant after he lit the flare, that Nick Hickam understood the magnitude o
f his own stupidity.

  “Did you tell Mom?”

  Edgel shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “I might tell her someday.”

  “She might be relieved to know that he’ll never be around to bother her.”

  “Nick Hickam is the last thing on her mind, Jimmy Lee. She’s divorced, remarried, happy, and got no reason to come back here. The fewer people who know, the better.”

  “Why don’t you tell the sheriff?”

  “Where would that get us?”

  “It would eliminate any suspicion he might have that you did it.”

  “All it would do is put another black mark beside the name Hickam. No, Jimmy Lee, let’s just let it rest. The old man’s dead; Mr. Morgan got himself a new sawmill; I’ve got a good job; you’re going to college. That’s good enough for me.”

  He took the Twist-O-Flex out of my hands and pushed it back in his pocket.

  “What are you going to do with the watch?”

  Edgel pulled the blistered metal back out of his pocket and stared at it. “You want it?”

  I shook my head. “Nope.”

  “Let’s take a walk.”

  Edgel and I walked up the hillside past the spot where authorities had tackled and arrested our grandfather and cut through the wooded ridgeline to the ponds—old pits left behind by strip mining operations. Rumors had floated around Vinton County for years that the Youngstown and Steubenville mob used the ponds as a repository for bodies because the acidic waters supposedly ate away everything but a corpse’s teeth. I doubt the stories were true, but they made for great local legend. At the edge of the first pond, Edgel bounced the twisted metal in his palm a few times, and then pitched it far into the middle of the water. We stood in silence for a few minutes, watching as the ripples moved away from the point of entry and dissipated long before they made shore.