The kid could see the exhaustion in his father’s face, flat like panes of dark glass. When his father started to speak it was in a voice cracked and worn and he had to strain to hear him.
“I was scared the day I drove back to Bunky’s place. I had ya with me in a bassinette the hospital let me have. I jury-rigged it with twine and leather strapping so’s you’d be held in place while I drove.
“I couldn’t just drive right in there so I left ya in the shade by the trees at the head of the driveway and walked in. It was early morning. Didn’t think at first there was no one around an’ I stood at the edge of the yard tryin’ to decide what to do. I walked over to the barn an’ looked in an’ he weren’t in there so I headed fer the house. He musta heard me close the barn door or somethin’ cuz when I was about ten yards from the porch he stepped out the back door an’ raised a hand.
“ ‘Ya kin just stop right there, Eldon,’ is what he said to me. ‘I got nothin’ to say to ya no more.’ He told me I hadda lotta nerve even showin’ up there.
“ ‘I know I ain’t welcome,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’ta come if there were any choice in the matter. Believe me.’
“I recall him puttin’ a hand on the backa one of them rockers an’ when he looked up at me I could see how turned against me he was. He said he wasn’t partial no more to no sad stories so a drunk could get himself a drink. I told him I weren’t after no drink, that I’d come to talk about Angie and that he hadda hear me out.
“I watched his face just at the mention of her name. He asked me if she was sick or hurt, if she needed anything. I could tell he woulda dropped everything to go to her.
“It weren’t easy comin’ outta me. I stood there in the yard feelin’ like I wanted to just turn tail an’ run an’ him starin’ hard at me like he’d pound the words outta me if I didn’t soon spill ’em on my own. I didn’t know how to start in an’ all I could get out was that she was gone. He figured I meant she run off more like. That she finally had the brains to leave me.
“I told him then that she was dead. That there was a baby but that she didn’t make it, that I weren’t there when the baby started to come. He took it hard, Frank, and when he started to blame me I didn’t offer no other account. I watched him stagger like gettin’ hit with a bullet. He grabbed at the porch post for balance then he slumped down into one of them rockers with a hand to his mouth an’ breathin’ so ragged through his fingers I could hear him from where I stood. Then he closed his eyes. He was shakin’.
“ ‘You were drunk.’ He stood up slowly. ‘When she needed you most you were drunk. I could kill you,’ he said to me.
“ ‘Wish ya would,’ I told him and meant it. ‘It’d make everything easier,’ I said.
“He looked at me for a moment. ‘You don’t get to have anything easier,’ he said. ‘You don’t deserve easier.’
“And we stood for the longest time saying nothing further. I started to walk away then and when I turned he’d already headed back toward the house.
“ ‘I got the boy,’ I said. ‘He’s in the truck down the drive.’ I told him that I didn’t have it in me to take care of a baby, that all I could think of to do was drink.
“Bunky stopped where he was without moving.
“ ‘I got no time for no newborn either. If that’s where yer headin’.’
“ ‘Would ya just see him even?’ I asked him.
“I remember hearin’ a rooster crow and the clatter of cowbells in the field an’ that silence between us a lot louder’n any of that. I didn’t think he was gonna move or say anythin’ more so I kinda half turned to leave. ‘He’s her son,’ he said. ‘Least I can do is see him since ya brung him out here. Might do to get him outta that damn truck too, ya dumb son of a bitch.’
“We walked down the drive without speakin’. He was all straight, like he had a poker down his back, all business, and I could feel the anger comin’ off him. When we got to the truck he just stood there leanin’ against the door frame an’ lookin’ at you through the open window. I didn’t know what to do. He stood there an awful long time an’ when he turned to me there was grief in his eyes an’ he took out a hanky from his back pocket.
“ ‘Fetch him up to the house,’ he said. ‘I got good fresh cow’s milk. We’ll feed him and then you can be on your way. You got a bottle, don’t ya?’
“He didn’t give me time to answer. He just marched back up the driveway without looking back. So I got your bassinette untied and followed him up to the house. We sat in the rockers on the porch. Bunky held ya and fed ya. I was no hell at any of it. Bunky’d even changed yer diaper and I sat and watched as he give ya that bottle, runnin’ his finger down the side of yer face. He looked plumb happy doin’ it and I recollect feelin’ lost on accounta all I could feel was sore and ragged and rough inside.
“After a while he said, ‘I’ll do it. Not for you. For him and for her. He’ll be my responsibility,’ he told me. ‘Not yours. Not ever.’ So I told him he wouldn’t get no trouble from me and he just looked at me hard and said he’d better not.
“Then he said he’d raise ya cuz he owed her. I didn’t get it an’ I asked him and all he done was keep on lookin’ down at you for the longest time. When he looked up at me again he clutched ya to his chest and put his chin on the top of yer head and just watched me. Then he said that she brung him to life. Said he was movin’ through his life by recollection until she come along and showed him how to look at things again.
“ ‘I got bigger on accounta her.’ That’s what he said. ‘I got made better.’
“I knew what he meant, Frank. I got made better too. But not better enough on accounta when she needed me most I wasn’t there an’ she died cuz of that. I looked at the two of you on that rocker an’ all’s I could do was walk away. All’s I could do was walk away because I guess I come to know right there that some holes get filled when people die. Dirt fills ’em. But other holes, well, ya walk around with them holes in ya forever and there weren’t nothin’ in the world to say about that. Nothin’.”
The light had begun to climb higher in the sky and they could see shadow relenting and giving way to dawn. Birds twittered and there was a soft soughing of breeze in the top branches of the trees. The kid sat and watched morning break slowly and hunted for words but the trail was empty and he found nothing. He looked at his father’s ravaged face. Trembling harder and gaunt as empty saddlebags, he fought the spasms in his gut and the kid thought he might tumble off the rock.
“He said he’d try’n teach you Indian things even though he wasn’t no Indian himself. Said he’d show you your mother’s way as best he could. Said he’d love you like his own. Far’s I know he done all that.”
“He did,” the kid said.
“He told me I could come whenever I wanted long as I wasn’t drunk or drinkin’. I come a few times but after a while I couldn’t hold to that promise. When you were older he let you come see me where I was. Didn’t want to but he let you anyhow.
“He’s the one called you Frank. Franklin. Said there was a man one time stood out in a thunderstorm with a key tied to a kite. Said that man was trying to catch the lightning. Said he knew the world would change if he caught it. Took courage, he said, to want something for others like that. So he named you for that man.”
“Ben Franklin.”
“Yeah.”
“How come he never told me?”
“Guess he figured that was up to me.”
“You never give up nothing until now.”
His father closed his eyes again. The kid tried to see himself in him. All he could see was a shivering, dying man. All he could see was woe. His father shuddered and the force of it racked his whole body and the kid went to him and helped him stand and then walked him slowly back to the fire. It had died down. When he had him settled he went into the trees and came back with an armload of wood and kindled the fire and watched it catch. The morning had broken fair. The sun cast a spindle of light across the top of the r
idge on the far side of the valley. His father groaned. He got the bottle of medicine and tilted his father’s head back and waited while he sipped. He made him take as much as he could. Then he laid him with his head leaned against the pack. When he was out he went into the trees again and came back with four saplings. He stripped them of bark with the knife then built a lean- to over his father to shelter him from the sun. He covered the frame with spruce branches. His father slept in the shade of it, his breath raspy and thin, shuddering now and then and moaning.
He thought about everything he’d been told. It was grim but more than he’d had before. It felt alien, like listening on someone else’s story. The skeletal man who slept in front of him seemed to resemble nothing of the man who’d walked through the tale he told. He wondered how time worked on a person. He wondered how he would look years on and what effect this history would have on him. He’d expected that it might have filled him but all he felt was emptiness and a fear that there would be nothing that could fill that void. His thoughts turned toward Eldon Starlight and there was only pity there for a life with benchmarks that only ever set out the boundaries of pain and loss, woe and regret, nothing to bring him comfort in his last days. He thought of his lost mother, and wondered how it might have felt to touch her, to put a hand or the other on her shoulder and claim some of her energy as his own, or if, as an infant, enough of her spirit had clung to him despite all the lean years of absence to carry him forward without loneliness. He hoped so. His life was built of the stories of vague ghosts. He wanted desperately to see them fleshed out and vital. History, he supposed, lacked that power. He rubbed his palms together slowly then held them out to the fire.
His father slept on. The kid sat by the fire and whittled saplings with his knife. Hours passed and when he looked up his father was staring at him from the lean-to, his eyes glimmering so that he looked mad with the sheen of sweat on his brow. The kid stared back at him. Neither of them spoke. Finally, the kid got up and walked to him and let him drink from the canteen. He only managed a small swallow or two then pointed to the fire and the kid hooked his hands under his arms and lifted and walked him to the fire and sat him on the ground beside it. His father hunched there, nodding as though hearing the words of a silent conversation.
“You shoulda told me the whole story a long time ago,” the kid said.
“I don’t know that I coulda.” His father stared into the fire. He coughed and his hand came away sprayed with the grainy clots of blood and he stared at it until the kid gathered some moss and wiped it away. His father put his hand against his chest and the kid could see that it pained him to breathe. “She was the breath of me, Frank. I don’t know as I took another full one all this time.”
The kid nodded. “I ain’t never had no hurt like that. But I think I get it now.”
“I’m surprised you don’t hate me outright.” His father coughed into his hand again and wiped his palm on his pants. “Could ya walk me back to the edge, Frank,” he said.
The kid got up and stretched out a hand and his father took it. He could feel the finger bones and the dry rasp of his skin against his palm. He pulled him to his feet and then hooked an arm around his back and up under his armpit and began to walk. They picked their way across the thirty feet of space and came to the edge.
In the valley below the river was a mercury ribbon. It fluttered through the valley and here and there they could see the crosshatch of trees and shrubs and bushes and the dim whiteness of stones along the banks. The mountains behind it were a black wall. The kid took his father as close to the lip of the plummet as he dared and they stood there latched to each other, staring away across the great vast space.
His father stepped to the very edge, still clinging to him. Then he nudged him aside and the kid watched as he closed his eyes and stood there wobbling on the edge of that drop. He wondered if he needed to reach out and grab him but his father slowly raised his arms to shoulder height and held them there with eyes closed and his head tilted back, moaning something soft and low that the kid leaned closer to hear.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”
24
HE WORSENED AGAIN once they got back to the fire. He vomited more and eventually there was nothing left to heave but a thin trickle. When he spewed, his stomach caused him horrific pain and he clutched at it and rolled on the ground. By the time night fell completely, not even the heat of the fire was enough to warm him. The kid covered him as best he could and stoked the fire high. Then he lay down beside him on the ground and pulled him close. Eventually he settled and the kid could hear his steady shallow breathing. He held on to him. When the kid dropped off to sleep himself he didn’t know. He dreamed there was a man and a woman seated on a blanket. They were talking and their heads were bent close together, but he couldn’t see their faces or hear what they were saying. Then he was on the porch of a house he didn’t recognize. The sun was going down. The sky was alive with colour and he could see it bending and receding above the fields. A woman was there. She stood in the middle of the field, looking at him. She waved with both arms and he waved back at her but it was his father she was waving at. He was striding across the field and then broke into a run and the kid closed his eyes.
The kid heard him leave in the darkness. There was a huff of breath, a short jolt, and then quiet. He lay there awake and looked out at the night and felt the stillness. It was heavy as a thick blanket, and in the depth of that quiet he was afraid to move, afraid to break it, of sacrilege, of piercing something that settled over him seamlessly, attached him to his dead father, who lay in silhouette against the glint of the moon. After a while, he rose and fumbled about for a stick of wood and pitched it sideways into the fire. It sent embers arcing high into the night and he watched them climb and peak and fall. Then he pitched another and the flames licked at the bark and slowly erupted into flame all blue and yellow and on into orange as it caught and held and ate away at the chill and dark around him. In the wavering light his father appeared to breathe and the kid caught his own breath. But there was only stillness.
After a time he reached out a hand and traced his father’s face with his fingertips, like memorizing it with his skin. He followed the scarp of bone over the eyes and onto the broad plain of his forehead and stopped at the bramble of hair. Then he took two fingers of the other hand and traced his own face at the same time. With his eyes closed he could feel the plummet from the brow to the nose and the long slide to the dip down to the mouth, full and plump and broad. Then the hollow at the top of the chin. He followed the squared nub of chin to the cascade of skin of the throat, to the poke of Adam’s apple and into the basin of the clavicle. “Shh. Hush,” he said for no reason he could think of and gently closed his father’s eyes.
He put a hand against his father’s chest and held it there a long time and only when he felt the air change and the shadow ease in the first pale aquamarine of morning did he raise it and let it settle against his own chest. Then he stood looking down at his father. Quiet. He took two fingers and knelt and laid them against his father’s lips again.
“Shh,” he said again. “Hush.” Like a benediction.
25
IT TOOK HIM ALL MORNING to dig the grave. The ground near the precipice was stony and hard. He poked around with the edge of the pick and found a spot with give and started to hollow it out. There was a layer of dry, crumbly soil about ten inches deep and once he got to the bottom of that he hit the sand and rocks. He had to root about and find the edges of the stones in order to dig around them, to get a grip so he could lift them out, and some were as big as loaves of bread. He thought of his father fencing ten acres in his days at the farm when he came to know his mother. This was less digging than it was leveraging out a hole. He got to about five feet and struck a bed of rock. For a while he tried to find the end of it with the folding shovel but it was huge and he gave up and sat at the edge of his dig and looked out over the valley. The grave was dug within
six feet of the edge and the view to the east was astounding in the clear autumn light. He drank from the canteen and sloshed a handful of water over his face. He didn’t want the varmints or wolves or bears to get at his father’s remains. He spent hours trundling rocks and stones from among the trees to the gravesite. There was a moss-covered rock shaped like a football that lay in the shadow a few hundred yards away and he took the rope and the horse and managed to haul it over. It would sit perfectly atop the stones if he could get it up there.
When he had enough stones assembled he ran water over his hands to clean them and then walked over to where his father lay under the lean-to. He bent down and looked closely at him.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” he shouted. He cried then, feeling the raw edges of a new hurt deep within him.
He took the coat that covered his father and laid it beside the lean-to. Then he squatted and pushed his hands under and pulled him toward himself and lifted him, cradling him as he stood with the insignificant weight of him in his arms. He walked slowly across the clearing to the grave and when he got there he set his father down and stood looking at the hole.
It seemed a poor end and he took the hatchet and stalked off into the trees for an armload of boughs and moss and he lined the bottom of the hole with them. Then he pulled the makings from his back pocket and opened the bag and sprinkled a pinch of tobacco on the bed of boughs. He wasn’t much for prayer and it was the only ritual that he knew. It was an act of honouring. He looked up at the sky and followed the line of horizon along the saw edge of mountain and thought about what he might say. All he found was a quiet place inside him like the silence his father lay in and he let himself have that. Then he lifted him and lowered him into the hole feet first and clambered in with him. The space was small but he managed to fold the body and seat it and arrange the arms and hands across the chest. He set his father’s head against his kneecaps. When he was satisfied he climbed out of the hole and stood looking down at the shape of his father in the grave. There was a small breeze now blowing off the land and across the chasm and the kid gazed out and away across the valley.
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