Piper

by John E. Keegan

  “Yeah.”

  “I was obsessed with it, but I figured, worst case, she’d cheated on me and I still loved her.”

  “Were you really going to print the story about her and Carlisle?”

  He pushed his back against the fence and spread his arms in a crucifixion. “Only if I had the guts to print the rest of the story.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was there too.”

  “At Carlisle’s?”

  “We’d gone to his place to celebrate the nine-hundredth issue of the Herald or some foolish thing. John wanted to have champagne and make a big deal of it and we’d all had too much to drink.” Dad was scraping the arch of his shoe against one of the planks in the fence. “We’d had a terrible argument that day. I told her people were talking. I wanted her to come home, but she took off her clothes and climbed into the tub. She begged me to join her. ‘Stay, Tom, have some fun,’ she said.”

  “Did you stay?”

  His voice dropped and I could hear the air go out of him. “I left … I just left.”

  His words hung in the air like a big spider. He was probably waiting for me to call him a coward, but I couldn’t. Then I felt the fence moving, like someone had a hold of the posts and was shaking them, but it was Dad, sobbing into the jacket he’d pulled up over his face.

  I pushed myself against him. “You didn’t know.”

  “I should have stayed …”

  I put my arm around him and the weight of his back trapped my hand flat against the fence. He kept the coat over his face. The misery of no second chances. “Dad, stop beating yourself up. Don’t you see what happened? Nothing was going on with Mom and John Carlisle. He was gay. He was also my uncle. But he was abandoned. You know what a sucker Mom was for orphans. That’s why she picked me.” I could feel his arms moving against my back. “Her last words to you were beautiful. It’s what I would have imagined her saying when she fell in love with you in Chicago and you were nursing her back to health. She wanted you. It never went away. You were still her Irish poet.” He was definitely squeezing me now and the corner of my mouth was pressed against his jacket so hard that I wasn’t even sure he could hear me. “I know I’m not making sense. You need a Tom Scanlon in your corner, someone to see the truth in this, and all you’ve got is me.” I’d never been held onto like that and I realized that’s what he must have felt like to Mom.

  Our conversation had knocked the wind out of him, and he was gradually coming out of it, regaining his bearings. He took a couple of deep breaths and let go of me. I stepped to the side and he pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose. I knew he was probably embarrassed at having lost it. That wasn’t his natural state.

  We walked along the white plank fence toward the house, and then started around the house. Neither one of us said anything. I would have welcomed the chaos of Willard and the dogs just then, but they’d probably disappeared into the neighborhood, looking for garbage cans and pee spots from other dogs. I knew we weren’t done. It was my turn and if I’d had a piece of paper and a pen, I would have just scratched something out and handed it to him. His first bad poem.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah.” His voice was normal again.

  “This comes under the category of confessions, I guess. Maybe letdowns.” I half expected him to say there were no bad confessions, to tell me we’d had enough for one night, but he just kept treading the perimeter of the house like a sentry listening for suspicious noises. “I know I didn’t turn out the way you and Mom had hoped. She was so beautiful and womanly and I’m so clunky and genderless.”

  “Genderless?”

  “You know. Sexually ambiguous.”

  He let out an exasperated breath. “Sexually what?”

  I must have been mumbling. Maybe he thought I’d said sexually ambitious, and he was going to launch into his sermon on free will, and I’d have to stop him and tell him it was worse than that. “Mom always wanted me to find a nice man, but … I’m not going to. I can’t.”

  “Oh, come on. You’re still young.”

  “Dad. I don’t want to find a man. I’m not that way.” There, I’d said it. I kicked a piece of paper in the dewy grass and it stuck to my shoe. “It wasn’t like I didn’t try. All my life I wanted something in me to be like her. The sexiness, the artistry, but there was nothing.” I wasn’t crying, but my insides were heaving and I was feeling chilled along my front where I was still sweaty from being against him. “She’d be so disappointed in me.”

  I watched his shoes stop in the grass. “You’re wrong about that part,” he said.

  “You can’t say that, Dad. You didn’t hear some of the things she said to me.”

  “She proved it, didn’t she? You just said so. Through John Carlisle. She wasn’t disappointed in him.”

  Something broke open in me when he said that, but I knew what it was. Mom had said I’d be bathed in light like Aphrodite. That had turned out to be hyperbole. Mine was more like the glimmer from a faraway comet, a happening that I had no control over and still only dimly understood.

  I looked over at Dad. He was rubbing his face hard with the insides of his hands. I waited until he stopped. “What about you, Dad? Are you disappointed?”

  He hesitated, maybe he was letting his eyes readjust. “How can I be disappointed? That’s who you are. It’s just going to take me a while to get used to the idea. My Irish didn’t prepare me for girls like you and your mother.”

  The next morning, after celebrating our arrival with a sit-down meal of hotcakes and country sausages at a cafe in downtown Hannibal, we went upriver until we found a low bank where we could walk right next to the Mississippi. We were well off the highway so we just let the dogs go free and, like rainwater, they drained down the slope until they hit the river, and waded out. It was a working river, muddy and powerful like a tugboat, and I thought I could detect a faint smell of diesel. I threw a stick in to make sure it was moving, and it sure was, flowing toward New Orleans like geologic time. Across from where we stood, there was an island in the middle of the river and I wondered if it was Jackson Island.

  “Hey, Willard,” I said, “there’s where Huck and Jim boarded the floating house and found the naked dead man.”

  He put his hand over his eyes and squinted. “He was naked?”

  We could have gone to Bemidji, Minnesota and tried to run the whole two thousand miles of the river, cruising past Minneapolis, but I wasn’t sure the paddle wheelers went up that far. Besides, I knew Willard would enjoy the business end of the river more, for the same reason he respected the business end of a socket wrench.

  Willard found a dilapidated raft along the shore, sun-bleached planks hammered onto three slimy logs by bent-over spikes. “Piper, here’s what we’ve been looking for.” I knew what he meant. The makeshift raft represented the romance of the river, an amalgam of dream and practicality. “Let’s put something on it and send it down.”

  I sat on the ground next to the raft and watched the subtle patterns of current form in the water like the creases in newsprint. Willard soon lost interest in the raft and moved along the shore exploring for more treasures. I watched him and Dad throw sticks for the dogs and make them sit for pictures on the bank. Grown men with boyish hearts. I’d never thought of Dad as a caretaker, but there he was, with his pack. That’s also why John Carlisle had stayed around Stampede, to watch over me, to make sure I didn’t fall between the cracks like his sister had. Willard had said it. We’re all just strays waiting to be found.

  I was also thinking about the phone call to the Prosecutor’s office that Dad told me about after breakfast. The Spigot Lake kids had recanted their statements. It was small town hysteria just the way he’d figured it all along. I told him that Dirk’s accusations were false too, something else Dad had always known. He’d written it up that way in his own investigation of the charges, the story that never ran. I was relieved to know that John Carlisle was innocent of the heinous acts he’d been
accused of, but now I was deeply saddened at the way I’d treated him, how I’d missed the opportunity to share in his grief over Mom’s death. I’d mistaken an ally for an adversary.

  Although I hadn’t told Dad yet, I’d also decided what to do with the Carlisle house. It was so obvious I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen it immediately—maybe it was because I kept thinking of it as a place I had to live—but I was going to sell the house and give the money to Dad so he could rebuild the newspaper. He and Seamus could run it like the Clemens brothers had run the Hannibal Journal. If that didn’t suit him, he could use it as traveling money and knock on the doors of some of the big dailies. After all, he was the one who’d earned it, covering for John Carlisle all those years. All I wanted out of the house were Mom’s paintings. If Dad refused the money, I was going to give it to Willard and Edda for their halfway house for cats and dogs.

  I pulled a crumpled paper sack out of my jacket, opened it, and stuck my hand inside. It was something I’d saved for no particular reason and dragged along on the trip: a sack of hair, the hair I’d shaved off after Mom died. It was weighing me down. When I pulled a fistful of it out the mouth of the sack, the breeze caught a few tufts and they wafted downstream like dandelion seed. It was soft and compressed easily when I stuffed it back inside and rolled the sack into a package the size of a leftover half-sandwich. I had to let go of something.

  I wedged the sack between two of the cross-pieces on the raft, kicked off my shoes and waded into the river. The silt on the bottom squished between my toes and my hair had grown back far enough that I could feel it tickling my forehead. I dislodged the raft from the tangle of brush and pulled it out next to me. I thought of how Rozene had helped open something powerful in me and I could hear Mom’s voice in the back of my head. Well, honey, it’s not what I had in mind, but at least you’ve managed to save your confidence as long as your virginity.

  When I told Dad I didn’t know how I’d ever get used to the idea of being a Carlisle, he said, “You’ll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind.” And I knew he was right.

  The water clapped against the undersides of the planks. I pushed the end of the raft under water and it popped right back up, the water beading off the dry membrane of the boards. Everything was working. I shoved it as hard as I could toward the center of the channel where it rocked and bobbed and finally settled into the drift of the river. Knee-high in the water, the current flowed between my legs as I watched until the raft disappeared on the river’s horizon.

  Acknowledgment

  I thank the people who helped me write and publish this story, especially Carla Carlstrom, David, Mike, Pat, and Mark Keegan, Sharon “Moxie” Langus, Neil McCluskey, Judith and Marty Shepard, Julie Weston, and Bruce Wexler.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2001 by John E. Keegan

  978-1-5040-1579-0

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