Roses

by Leila Meacham

  Wyatt possessed the male version of Lucy’s solid, compact form, while Matthew had inherited Mary’s long, willowy frame. Posture would always be a problem for Wyatt, whereas it never would for Matthew. Percy wished there were a device to stretch Wyatt’s stumpy neck and correct the oafish slump of his shoulders. In comparison, his older brother sat in the pew with his head high, back straight, and shoulders squared, all held with Mary’s effortless grace.

  This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased….

  Rising to sing with the congregation, Percy remonstrated with himself over the unfairness in being pleased with only one son. He should be pleased with Wyatt, too. The boy tried harder at what came naturally to Matthew and therefore more easily. Only aggression was natural to Wyatt, a sort of controlled belligerence that stood him in good stead in playing football, a sport at which both boys excelled. It surprised Percy that Wyatt took so readily to the bridle of rules and discipline and team play required to play football. But he did, and with a total commitment that Percy could not help but admire.

  The boys had been playing the game since each was in the seventh grade and were now co-captains of the junior varsity team. Their group was being predicted to lead Howbutker to its first state championship, a future thrill that both Percy and Ollie looked forward to eagerly.

  The two men often attended practice sessions together but saw the game with their wives separately, occupying seats on the fifty-yard line at each end of their row. Matthew played quarterback; Wyatt was an offensive lineman who led his teammates in protecting their leader and opening holes for him to streak through. Lucy’s eyes never left Wyatt’s bull-like figure on the field. Percy’s rarely strayed from Matthew’s thoroughbred form. He could not believe the boy’s agility in outmaneuvering his opponents, his intelligence in calling plays, the sheer magic of his skill in firing the ball to a receiver in the end zone. It was breathtaking, it was wonderful. Inside himself, as the roar of the hometown crowd filled his ears, he’d shout: That’s my son! That’s my son!

  But there was reason to be proud of Wyatt, too. Though slow to comprehend, he retained everything he learned. He was conscientious in his studies, staying up as a matter of routine until all hours of the night to wrestle with the dragons of his homework. Percy kept an eye on his academic progress through Sara, and from her he learned of his son’s near failures and close victories, marks that never reflected his effort and perseverance.

  Whenever he returned late from meetings or a visit to Sara’s and saw a light still on in his son’s bedroom, he did not step inside to ask how it was going, the way he once had. Wyatt had not appeared to welcome these intrusions and had merely grunted an answer without lifting his head from his books.

  He labored hard when put to work at the mills also. Managers extolled his efforts, as amazed as Percy that he did not take advantage of being the boss’s son to shirk his duties any more than he used his father’s position as president of the school board to wangle favors from his teachers. Wyatt accepted Percy’s praise in these matters with the same dispassion with which Percy suspected his son would take his criticism. His indifference eased Percy’s shame that Wyatt’s dogged victories, his heroic efforts, never reached his heart like Matthew’s easier, more natural ones.

  A cough broke the listening silence of the congregation as the scripture was read. A number of heads, including Percy’s, turned toward the DuMonts’ pew. The perpetrator had been Matthew. Percy saw Ollie discreetly slip him his handkerchief. Matthew coughed into it, a deep, jacket-tightening hack that drew Wyatt’s worried gaze.

  Percy felt a jab of concern. The boy’s coming down with a cold, he thought, glad that Ollie would be there to look after him. He wouldn’t have to worry about Ollie running off to the store and leaving Matthew at home ill.

  “… give, and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap,” the minister read. “For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

  Percy listened to the Text and his eyes went again to Ollie. There, sitting beside his friend and waiting at home, was proof of the scripture’s promise. Ollie had always given full measure without counting the cost. Of all the men he’d ever known, or would know, Ollie was the most giving. If he’d had to lose the woman he loved to another man, he was glad it was Ollie. If he’d had to give up the son he could not claim to another to raise, he was glad it was Ollie. If his other son turned from him to another father to honor and love, he was glad it was Ollie. Ollie’s cup did indeed run over, and deservedly so. Percy was happy for him. He questioned only how it was that he had ended up with a measure so much less.

  The service was ending. As the congregation rose for the benediction, Matthew flashed him a grin over his shoulder and jiggled his eyebrows. Percy chuckled, but his concern deepened. The boy looked pale and a little thinner than when he’d last seen him. Once the prayer was finished, he waited by his pew for Ollie and his charges to draw abreast.

  “How about coming to the house for Sunday dinner, Percy?” Ollie invited. “Sassie’s having chicken and dumplings. Matthew here”—he gave the boy’s shoulder a mock punch—“has been off his feed lately, and Sassie thought that might be just the ticket to get him eating again. Me, I don’t need an excuse to eat Sassie’s chicken and dumplings. I hope nobody heard my stomach growling.”

  “We did, Dad,” Matthew said, rolling his mother’s eyes, “but we thought it was thunder sounding on the plain.”

  “That’ll be good for a couple of boxed ears,” Ollie said benignly. “How about it, Percy, my boy? We’re stealing Wyatt as it is.”

  Percy wanted to accept. Lucy would be playing bridge with the lowbred cronies with whom she cavorted every Sunday, knowing that Wyatt would be well fed at the DuMonts’. But Wyatt glanced down and shuffled his feet, and Percy took that as a sign that his son preferred he decline. So he said, “Thanks anyway, but I had planned to do a little work at the office.” In reality, he’d be going to Sara’s house later and eating a grilled cheese sandwich, probably scorched. Her talents did not include cooking. Matthew definitely looked peaked, he decided, and he worried that the DuMont household might not be taking the boy’s condition as seriously as it should. “Wyatt, don’t overstay your welcome, you hear?” he said. “Let Matthew get some rest this afternoon. Kick him home, Ollie, when you need to.”

  Ollie looked at Wyatt affectionately and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Will do, but Wyatt never overstays his welcome.”

  “Well, then behave yourself,” Percy said, and added as an afterthought for Wyatt’s benefit, “He always does. Why do I feel I have to say that?”

  “Because you’re his father,” Ollie said, a wise twinkle in his eye.

  So it was with some surprise, but no shock, that Percy found Wyatt waiting for him when he returned from Sara’s earlier than planned that afternoon.

  Chapter Forty-two

  He’d driven home with a heavy heart. Sara was leaving him. She’d accepted a job far out in West Texas, where school districts on oil-rich lands could double the salary she was making in Howbutker. There was no future for her here, anyway, she’d said, her look tender but her meaning clear. Sadly, Percy had concurred.

  He entered his drive wishing he had somewhere else to go. He’d rather be anywhere but here. He could have gone to his office, but he had no mental energy today for paperwork. He was hungry for food and comfort, neither of which his home provided. His house and grounds had the look and feel of a neglected mausoleum. All the help had gone except for the cleaning women who occasionally came in when Lucy, occupied with her card parties, thought to arrange for them. Since they no longer entertained—once their old cook retired—Lucy saw no need to hire a replacement. She did not like to bother with supervising the kitchen or planning menus or checking accounts, preferring to put together simple meals for her and Wyatt to eat at the kitchen table hours before Percy came home. Sometimes she left a plate warming for
him, sometimes she didn’t.

  As he drove past the house to the garages in back, Percy noticed the overgrown flower beds and newly fallen leaves in need of raking. Nobody lives here anymore, he thought gloomily, spying a crack in one of the mullioned windows of the sunroom. Inside the house, he had knelt to examine it when he heard a throat cleared from behind him. “Dad?”

  He threw a startled glance over his shoulder. “Wyatt? What are you doing here? I thought you’d be at the DuMonts’.”

  Wyatt swatted a cobweb hanging from the door and shuffled into the room. Doesn’t he ever pick up his feet? Percy asked himself with a flash of annoyance, then realized that of course he did. He’d seen him lift those size thirteen D’s often enough on a football field. It was only around him that he dragged his dogs.

  “Something wrong with the window?”

  “It’s cracked. Probably hit by a bird or a BB. I’ll have to get it replaced.” He brushed the dust off his hands as he got up. The windowpanes were dirty, like most of the house. “Things are cracking up around here,” he said with a grin at his pun. “You look like something’s on your mind. What is it?”

  Percy thought he could guess. He’s come to ask if he can work out at the plantation on Saturdays with Matthew through the harvest, he conjectured. He should have seen it coming. Each boy understood that he was to work at his family’s business on Saturdays throughout the school year and every day but weekends during summer. Percy often wondered if Matthew had ever had a choice as to whether he wanted to learn farming or retailing. From the time he could walk, Mary had dragged him out to Somerset. He didn’t believe the kid had ever so much as stood behind a counter in the DuMont Department Store. Matthew didn’t appear overenthusiastic about his future as a farmer, but he didn’t balk at it, either, minding his chores with the same cheerfulness with which he attended everything else.

  Percy was as uncertain of Wyatt’s feelings for the vocation for which he was being groomed. The boy labored uncomplainingly and willingly, but silently. He’d never expressed one sentiment about the business he would someday share with his father—and, in time, inherit.

  “Well?” he prompted.

  Wyat’s gaze roved, refusing to meet Percy’s—another affliction he suffered in his presence. “It’s Matthew,” he said with his usual lack of inflection.

  “What about Matthew?”

  “I think he’s really sick, Dad, and he won’t let me tell Mister Ollie or Miss Mary or Coach. I didn’t promise nothin’ about telling you.”

  It seemed to Percy that all time stopped. “What makes you think he’s sick, son?” The address slipped out naturally. Neither indicated he took note of it. “You can tell me. I heard him coughing in church and thought it was a cold. What makes you think it’s more than that?”

  “He’s got a fever. I made him let me take his temperature. It was a hundred and four degrees. He don’t look right, neither. I’m awful worried about him.”

  For once, Percy took no notice of the poor grammar that ordinarily set his teeth on edge. Percy heard only urgency in Wyatt’s tone and saw it in the blue eyes that were at last riveted to his. “Where is Matthew now?”

  “Upstairs in my room. His folks think we’re at the practice field throwing a few balls around. Matthew barely made it through dinner.”

  Appalled, Percy said, “You mean they let him go? They didn’t notice that he was sick?”

  “You know Matthew, Dad. The way he can carry on, nobody’d know nothin’ was the matter. He’s afraid if his folks or Coach find out, they won’t let him play Friday night.”

  “Then I was the wrong one to come to, Wyatt. If he’s sick, I’m calling his parents, game or no game Friday night.”

  Wyatt nodded. “That’s why I came to you. I knew that’s what you’d do. Matthew is more important than any dumb old football game.”

  Percy took the stairs two at a time to Wyatt’s room, his son on his heels. “Ah, Wyatt, you told!” Matthew accused when Percy burst into the room and he saw the look on his godfather’s face.

  “I never promised I wouldn’t tell my dad,” Wyatt said. “You’re sick, man. You need to see a doctor.”

  Percy placed a hand on the boy’s forehead. It was burning up. His teeth were chattering in spite of the cocoon of blankets Wyatt had wrapped around him. “He’s right, Matthew,” Percy said. He could taste the metallic bite of fear in his mouth. The boy’s color was bad. There was a blue tinge about his eyes and under his nails. Percy had seen that cast in 1918 among his army buddies disembarking for home and carrying with them the deadly virus that would sweep the nation and kill four hundred thousand people in a flu epidemic. Oh, God, please don’t let it be what I think it is, he prayed, feeling his legs turn to putty.

  It was worse. Staphylococcal pneumonia, Doc Tanner’s new replacement diagnosed. The recently discovered antibiotics were powerless against it. How, where, and when Matthew had contracted the particular virulent strain—called the Bowery-bum variety—nobody knew. Those who sat numb with grief by his bedside knew only that it had come with devastating speed and was resisting every attempt at treatment. One week Matthew had been a healthy, active teenager bent on leading his team to victory Friday night, and the next he was lying in bed fighting for breath, coughing up spume, death already behind the sunken green eyes peering out at the faces peering in, desperation meeting desperation.

  “Doctor, do something!” Mary wailed, clutching the new doctor’s sleeve, her face a bloodless mask.

  But he and the specialists consulted sadly agreed that there was nothing more to be done except pray that Matthew could ride it out. He was young and healthy and strong, and there were reported cases of victims his age who had survived the disease.

  A room was prepared in the Toliver house for Percy and Wyatt to share so that they would be near Matthew’s bedside. “It would mean so much to all of us for you and Wyatt to stay here until the boy’s better, Percy,” Ollie said when it became apparent that Matthew might not recover. “You’ve been a second father to him. No man could have been more caring, and Wyatt could not have loved him more if they’d been brothers.”

  Percy looked at his friend—the man who knew that it was his son and Wyatt’s brother who lay dying—and could not speak for the love and anguish choking him. He was grateful, too, for Wyatt’s presence beside him in the sickroom and in the guest quarters, where they lay sleepless in twin beds, staring at the ceiling, bound together in mutual grief, until finally, toward morning, Percy was relieved to hear the sound of his son’s youthful snoring.

  It was Wyatt whom Matthew asked to see in the last hour of his life. Percy found him in the hall roaming like a blind bull, thick shoulders hunched, shaggy head drooped, hands shoved into pockets, dumb with grief. “Matthew is asking for you, son,” he said gently, and without speaking, their eyes never meeting, Wyatt followed his father to the sickroom, where he edged shyly around the door.

  “Hey, Wyatt,” Matthew said.

  “Hey, yourself.”

  “How’s practice going?”

  “Not so good without you.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll get back if I can.”

  Suddenly galvanized, as if an electric current had been switched on inside him, Wyatt lunged across the room and hauled a chair close to his bedside. “No ifs about it,” he said, speaking with hard insistence into the pneumonic face. “You have to come back, Matthew. We need you, man. I need you.”

  Matthew was silent. Then he whispered with the wheezy substance left of his breath, “I’ll get back, man. You may not see me, but I’ll be there. You keep on blasting holes in that line.”

  “No…,” Wyatt groaned. He reached for his friend’s hand and crushed it in his great grip against his chest, as if he could keep death from snatching him away. “No, Matthew… you can’t leave me, man.”

  Mary turned away, her eyes wide with terror, and Percy and Ollie bowed their heads. It was the first time they knew that Matthew realized he was dying.

/>   At the end, the ones who loved him best were all with him. Sassie and Toby hovered wet-eyed in the doorway, Abel looked on bleakly from a corner chair, Wyatt and Mary and Ollie hung over his bedside. Only Percy stood apart, gazing out the window at the sun rays slanting through the moss-draped cypress trees that Silas William Toliver had transplanted from Caddo Lake a century before. Toliver history had it that the trees were not expected to survive, but whatever the Tolivers planted on their land survived, year after year—no matter what disaster. Only the Toliver children died.

  “Dad…”

  Percy’s shoulders tensed, but he did not turn around. It was Ollie who answered. “I am here, my boy,” he said, and Percy heard his chair creak as he bent closer to his son. Beyond the window, the September afternoon blurred in a sea of blue and gold. The cypresses wept.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Matthew said clearly, the breathlessness gone. “I’m not afraid to die. I figure heaven’s like here and God’s like you.”

  Percy turned from the window in time to catch the last flicker in the green eyes fixed upon Ollie before the lids fluttered closed and the light was gone.

  Chapter Forty-three

  It seemed to Percy in the days following that Mary never left her stance before her parlor window overlooking the reclaimed rose garden. Morning, noon, and night he’d find her standing there, her back to the room, hands clasping her elbows, an aloof figure, drawn into herself. He was powerless to comfort her. He could not look into the grieving eyes of the mother of his son without betraying the grief of the father in his.

  He and Ollie and Sassie received the callers to the house, accepted the telegrams, the gifts of food and flowers, while Mary stood her vigil at the window, often acknowledging the condolences murmured to her frozen profile with only a nod of her dark chignoned head.

  “Chérie…,” Ollie consoled, embracing her stiff shoulders, smoothing the sleek sides of her hair, brushing his lips against the high, stoic curve of her cheek. “Ma chérie…”