by Jack Riggs
“That don't come on until Sunday,” he says, like that's not what day it is. “Give me that penny, will ya?”
Pops always collected pennies, picked them up off the ground for as long as I can remember. He told me once that a penny was all you needed to start making a million dollars. He'd find one, pick it up off the ground, look at it real good, then spit on it to make it shine. He said, “Rich people know the value of this. How do you think they got rich?” Then he'd put the penny in his shoe, said it would only bring good luck if you walked on it.
When we cleared out the house, I found pennies everywhere, boxes full, jars too. He had a drawer that had nothing but pennies in it. An old ammo box from a World War II army surplus store was fat with them, and one of Mom's old shoe boxes was full to running over. Pops always said that the next penny he found might put him over the top, so he saved every one he picked up, carried them in his shoes until he'd come home on the weekends from over at the Georgetown Steel Mill.
I watched him once shake six or seven copper coins out of each shoe. We read the dates and then put them in an empty cigar box. Cassie collected what she could find after Pops was moved, took it by the bank so it could be counted and cashed. There were more than ten thousand pennies in that house—a hundred dollars and fifty- seven cents’ worth to be exact.
I give Pops the penny and he looks at it in the dull light, squints his eyes but then gives up. “What's the date on this one?”
I pull his hand to me, my eyes not much better than his in this light. “Nineteen fifty- four,” I say.
“Nineteen fifty- four,” he parrots back. “Your momma cried that year,” he says, turning to look at me like it was my fault.
“How's that?” I ask.
“Don't play stupid with me, boy. You got that girl pregnant in nineteen fifty- four. Your momma cried for days over that, she was so worried.”
“Pops, that was Cassie,” I tell him.
“I know who it was,” he says back, his voice agitated. He pushes himself up into his chair, rearranges his body like the thought of my mom crying is too much for him to take, even if she's been dead eight years. “You shouldn't have done that.”
“Done what?” I ask.
“Knocked that girl up like that,” he yells at me.
“Pops,” I say, trying to be patient with him. “It was Cassie who got pregnant. I married her and now you have a beautiful granddaughter because of it.” This pushes hard against his mind. He can't put two and two together.
Pops is dying, his body letting go a little bit more every day and when it does, he speaks his mind, truth in a kind of craziness. His memory gets loose and I find out how he really felt about me at times when I was growing up. Tonight it's Cassie. He's scolding me for something I did that really pissed him off. He never showed it, never let me know how much it hurt, and I've learned over my own years how much pain comes with being a parent. Anger gets swallowed along the way when what you really want to do is knock some teeth out. I appreciate Pops not doing that. I'm better with my own child because of it. He's too old to take a swing at me now, so he just cusses me out and then we watch TV
When the commercials are over, I turn up the volume on Bonanza, try to help Pops let go of his memories. Hoss is riding into town with Little Joe, Ben Cartwright is in trouble with the law and sits in jail. Hoss's jaw is set tight. He's seething at the injustice taking place, but Little Joe calms him down, tells him to believe in the law, that when they get to Virginia City, everything will get figured out. It's early in the show, so I know that won't happen. Little Joe is going to be disappointed, at least for another half hour or so.
We're quiet for a bit until a nurse comes in to get Pops's dinner tray. She's surprised to see me. The nurse is black, one of the older ladies who have been here for a while. She's big, with deep charcoal skin that makes her white uniform and hat glow. Her eyes are lazy, sleepy like she might not care, but she's a friend and knows more about what's going on with Pops than most anyone else here. “Well hey, Mr. Peck. Ya'll doin’ all right in here?” she asks.
“Yes ma'am,” I say.
Daddy looks up, knows who's in front of him. “Margaret, I need to go pee.”
“You do now?” Margaret says, looking at me.
I just shrug my shoulders. “First time I heard that,” I tell her.
“Well, can you wait until the next commercial?” she asks. “Or do you need to go right now?”
“Next commercial,” Pops says. Margaret smiles at me as she goes over to close the blinds. She pulls the window shut even though it's hot enough to sweat a pig thin in the room. I don't say anything about it, don't want to mess up the routine. Even when it seems so much less, it's his life and he has people like Margaret to keep him company, to keep things regular.
She fusses around in the room, fluffing Pops's pillow, straightening his sheets to make sure they aren't soiled, her commentary running along with the action on Bonanza. “Hmmmm, mmmm,” she says. “That Hoss Cotright is sure aimin’ to get hisself in trouble,” she says. “That sheriff won't put up with any of that. Now where's his daddy anyway?” She sits on the bed next to Pops's chair like they're old friends. “What you got in your hand?” she asks him.
He looks at his hands like he has no idea until he sees the penny. “It's my penny,” he says.
“You found that today?” she asks. Her eyes lift up to me, shining in a way that says she's not just humoring Pops. She's keeping his mind going, pushing him to use the brain cells even if many of them no longer want to work.
“Nineteen fifty- four,” he says. He reaches out to let Margaret look at it. “Think it's the one. What do you think?” He watches Margaret as she takes the penny, turns toward the lamp, and examines the piece of copper through glasses perched on the tip of her nose.
“That's a good one, all right,” she says. “Better keep that in a special place.”
“In my shoe,” he says. The comment makes Margaret laugh.
“You don't wear shoes much no more, Mr. Johnson. And those slippers won't do you no good. Better find some other place to keep it safe.”
Margaret's words catch Pops off guard, make him use some more of those dying brain cells. He holds the penny in his shaky palm, closes it into a fist, then reaches over to hold it out in front of me. “Here,” he says.
“What?”
“You can have it,” Pops says. “Put it in your shoe. It'll be lucky then.”
Margaret looks at me, her eyes droopy, a smile breaking up the deep richness of her black skin. “It's a gift from your daddy. You best take it.”
And I do. It's silly, but they both sit there watching, waiting for me to put the damn thing in my boot. I sit on a stool, shove the penny down along my ankle, then shake the boot until I can feel it slide across my arch.
“I'll probably pull up lame walking on that thing,” I say.
Margaret stands then, pushes her tired body up off the bed with hands on her legs. “You never know what a penny might do for you,” she says, her lungs exhausted from the work to get herself up. I stand up next to Margaret, look at Pops, his body swollen, weakening with each labored breath.
Besides the diabetes, the doctor says he's having congestive heart failure now. They give him these diuretics to keep him flushed out, but he's pretty swollen around his ankles and feet. He's wearing slip- on bedroom shoes like Mom used to wear because he can't get his feet into regular shoes anymore. I don't know if he can stand or not. I don't know if he can get to the bathroom on his own.
When Bonanza goes to commercial break, I ask him again if he needs to go. “Where to?” he says like he might be going on a trip.
“You know, Pops—do you have to go to the bathroom?” I say.
He looks at himself, then at me like he can't quite figure out who I am. “Might need to do that,” he says.
I get his crutches and have Margaret hold them while Pops positions himself to stand. From in front his chair, I put both hands under his arms
, lift his swollen torso up, steady him until the crutches are firmly planted. “You go on now,” he says. “I can do it from here.”
“No Pops, I'm going to walk you, just in case.”
And then he becomes lucid, his smoky eyes clear, the liver spots on his loose skin quivering when he speaks. “No, boy” he says. “I can get there myself. Now you go on. Come by again when you can.”
We compromise and I stand with Margaret watching Pops hobble down the hallway. “Is he going to be all right?” I ask.
“He's having a good night,” she says, smiling. “He'll be just fine.” I want to wait to make sure he's okay but I trust Margaret's word. “You just go on,” she says, “and don't worry about him. Your daddy is doing just fine.”
Outside, I smell smoke, pungent and full on a hot breeze. I can't see anything in the air, so maybe it's just a small backyard fire, leaves left over from the winter being burned in someone's garden. Still, it worries me, smoke this far inland on a Sunday night in desperate drought conditions.
I pull into Barker's Servicenter, let Goose Hetzel fill the truck up. Goose is an old friend from school, a mechanic who also works the full- service pumps. He's checking my oil and the pressure in my tires when he tells me that there's a fire starting to burn out toward the paper- mill land. He says the sheriff was in talking about it early in the evening, tells me they have it under control. “Got to it quick,” he says like he was there himself. Then Goose walks up to my window, tells me I'm lucky to be on the beach. “Lots of water around you,” he laughs.
I pay with cash, remind him that Horry County's big, lots of dry land on the beach and off. If there's a fire out here, we'll all be fighting it sooner or later. Goose acts all hurt that I don't believe him when I ask again where the fire started, when I tell him I'm going to go take a look. He reminds me that the sheriff told him the fire was small and under control, but I don't buy anything that's more hearsay than truth. I don't care how long I've known Goose.
I leave Barker's and ride a ways out 701 toward the paper- mill land just to see for myself. The breeze kicked up by my truck moving down the road feels like a furnace. I can smell smoke but can't find fire, can't see anything illuminating the sky that would tell me one is burning inland. I start feeling bad about the way I treated Goose. Figure he was telling the truth about it being a small fire, practice for the big one everyone's afraid is coming this summer.
I slow down after taking a sharp curve past a trailer park where kids are shooting fireworks off in the drive. I don't like that, but I don't say anything. It's not my place out here. It's all going up into the air anyway, the embers arcing like a crooked smile out into the dark sky and then dying before they get near ground. It's not wise to let them do it, but no one in authority has yet said you can't shoot fireworks. No one's put a moratorium on anything except burning brush. They're even letting campers have fires still. The politicians are afraid that tourists will stop coming if there are safety regulations put in force, but I question their wisdom. Someone should have shut the whole mess down until we got rain, but they didn't, so we wait, keeping our eyes open and noses turned to the air.
Just past the boys is a shoulder deep enough that I can turn the truck around. I've gone ten miles out and seen no fire, so I'm thinking whatever it was is over with, gone. It's a good feeling accelerating back down 701, the town of Conway the only thing glowing off in the distance. I keep the windows on my truck rolled down, the wind blasting through.
There's a big old full moon over the trees in front of me casting shadows across the road. I'd love to head straight down to the water, get some relief with my board kicking up onto a wave, dropping me down into its trough, a silky smooth ride on a moonlit wave. I need to do that for my own sanity, but I won't go. I'm still exhausted. I need sleep more than I need to ride a wave, so I floor the accelerator trying not to think about Cassie and where she's sleeping tonight.
It's something I've never had to do before, worry about Cassie like this. It's impossible to avoid, so I just tell my truck to do its best to get me the hell out of here. I thank Goose Hetzel for his words of wisdom when I pass back through Conway, Barker's dark and closed up for the night.
Cassie
IN THE MORNING, light fills the room in a way that makes this house seem more livable than just hours ago. I can smell bacon cooking, coffee already done. I stretch, feeling a coolness in the sheets that I had forgotten about after living so long in the low country. In Garden City the air will be unforgiving for months. You go to sleep sticky, wake up with bed linens damp and hot like fever. But nearer the mountains, there is a coolness that comes back on evening breezes swept down from higher elevations to settle you in sleep, wake you up chilled.
It's Sunday morning and in the distance there is a record playing over a loudspeaker, some nearby church broadcasting familiar music to call out the congregation. The scratchy pops of an organ playing “The Old Rugged Cross” echo out across Walhalla. My father used to sing the hymn when he ministered at Whiteside Cove Baptist. He died ten years ago while still working and praying for the same small congregation that forgave him after his only daughter sinned and was forced to leave the cove.
Bitterness rises in my throat even now when I think about how he treated me, choosing his congregation over his own flesh and blood. For fifteen years I have felt like an outcast, a visitor only allowed to return to the mountains for a few short weeks in the summer. But now I am pushing my way back, trying to re- stake my claim and return home for good.
Out in the kitchen, I hear Clay's voice and feel the bitterness soften into a sudden rush of fatigue. I remember earlier this morning when he came to me again before there was light in the sky. He touched me with warm hands, a soft voice telling me he was about to go crazy. “I can't be here like this and not touch you,” he said. He kissed my neck, let his fingers part me below the covers. This is what we had wanted. This is what we had talked about, being here in Walhalla, alone together, far away from those dirty little motels and our dirty deeds. Yet, this morning I could not be a willing partner.
He sensed this and moved away, lay quietly for a few minutes longer. “It's been a hard time,” he said finally. “You rest as long as you need to.” He stood then, stepped into pants that were laying on the floor beside the bed, pulled a T- shirt out of his suitcase before leaving the room, the door closing quietly behind him.
I stayed in bed wanting to sleep for a hundred years, thinking that might be how long it would take to feel strong again. But now I'm awake. It's only a few short hours later and I'm hidden here beneath the covers listening to the old music fade away, the room falling quiet so that now I hear Kelly in the kitchen too. She's talking to Clay, trying to get along. I'm glad to know that she has come in from the car and not run away. For a moment, I can imagine that it will all work out, that Walhalla will be home and Kelly will accept our new life and no longer consider me an enemy.
Only then do I get up, caught naked in a mirror on the bedroom door. I feel like I am looking at a picture of someone else, my body beginning to let go of its part of the bargain. So much wasted time. I slip on a pair of shorts, find a blouse. I need to move faster, I think, faster before it's too late and none of it matters anymore.
The hallway is dark, cool on my bare feet. I can hear Clay talking, both of them laughing at something. When I enter the kitchen Kelly stops abruptly, the flush of old anger falling across her face.
“Good morning,” Clay says. He looks at me kindly, reaches over to find another cup for my coffee. “We've got eggs and bacon,” he says, “and if Kelly hasn't eaten it all, we've got some French toast for you too.”
“There's plenty left,” Kelly reports, but she's not looking at me when she says it.
I sit down and Clay puts a plate on the table, hands me a mug of coffee.
“Where did all this come from?” I ask, knowing last night there was nothing in the house to eat.
“Got up early,” Clay says. “Kelly did t
oo.” He looks over at her, but she's not going to give him any help in this.
The fresh coffee feels good going down, the room's chill falling away quickly. “Well, this is quite the surprise,” I say as I cut into a plateful of French toast. The room is silent until Kelly decides to get up. She pushes hard on her chair. The back legs like a pair of heels dig into the linoleum, sending a tremor through the whole floor.
I stop eating and watch Kelly as she walks over to the cabinet, reaches up for a mug, then lifts the pot to pour herself a cup of coffee. It's the first time I've seen this. “When did you start drinking coffee?” I ask.
She raises the mug to sip gingerly, the steam thick on top. “Daddy lets me, so I figured who cares.”
“I care,” I say, putting my fork down, waiting to see how far she will go. “I think you might be too young just yet.”
Clay tucks his head, an uneasy smile pulling at his face. He rubs at a smudge on the linoleum with the toe of his boot.
“Give Clay that cup, please,” I tell her.
He looks up, shifts his eyes between the two of us like he doesn't want to be part of any of this. “It's just a cup of coffee, Cassie.”
Kelly's eyes roll when he says this like she doesn't need him to defend her. I raise my elbows onto the table, clasp my hands together and look at both of them. “I don't want her to drink coffee yet,” I say. “She's just fifteen years old, so please take it back.”
Clay looks at Kelly, shakes his head. “Better give it here then.”
“No,” she says. “I can have it.”
“Kelly, this isn't the time to fight me,” I say. “I know what you're doing.”
“I'm not doing anything except drinking coffee.”
Clay looks at me hard. “Pick your battles,” he says.
“This isn't going to be a battle.” I can't let her win, though I'm thinking Clay's right. Whatever I've done, it's too late to retreat, and I feel myself get up from the table, move toward my daughter to take the cup away.
“No,” she says. She moves over to the sink where I can't get to her.