Joe Burke's Last Stand

by John Moncure Wetterau

  By one-thirty he was bumping down his father's road. The barn seemed empty when he stopped in front. Ann came out of the house to meet him. She was wearing a denim skirt and a black blouse. Her blonde hair was braided and wound behind her head. They had a long wordless hug. Ann had always been nice to him, and he was glad to be there, to be a supportive presence. She sighed and stepped back.

  “How nice to see you, Joe. Brendan's here. He flew in yesterday.”

  “Hi, Joe.” Brendan, his half brother, came through the front door. They patted each other on the arms, a compromise between hugging and shaking hands.

  “Brendan. A sad day,” Joe said.

  “Yes.” He was eleven years younger than Joe, healthy, blonde like Ann and squarely built like their father. His stylish short haircut, regular features, and white teeth were made for soap opera if his face had been less triangular. His small chin, set in front of a strong neck, gave him a power lifter look. He was wearing chinos and a tight fitting short sleeved shirt with an insignia over one pocket.

  Joe stretched. The sky was covered with an even layer of gray cloud. It was unseasonably warm. “Good to get out of the car,” he said. “Drove up from Boston.”

  “I got a flight to Bangor, yesterday,” Brendan said. “Mother picked me up.” They entered the house and sat in the living room. Something bumped against Joe's ankle.

  “Jeremy! Well, well. Jeremy. He looks in good shape, Ann. Thank you for taking care of him.” He turned to Brendan. “He abandoned ship on my last visit. I didn't realize it until I was in New Hampshire.”

  “Oh, he was great friends with your father. And, after a while, he got on nicely with Georgia.” Georgia was a fluffy black and white cat.

  “Ah, yes, Georgia—a champion mouser.” As if to take a bow, Georgia took three steps in from the hall and sat at the edge of the rug.

  “Since we're all here,” Ann said, “we might as well have a family conference.”

  “Mother, Joe has been driving all morning. How can he possibly have a conference without coffee or wine?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Joe, what can I get you?” he asked.

  “Wine.”

  Brendan brought out a bottle of Pinot Blanc and poured them each a glass. “Dad,” he toasted. They raised their glasses, drank, and were silent a moment.

  “I have something to tell you—or ask you boys.” Ann looked troubled. “I found your father in that small clearing in the woods, on his regular path, the walk he took most days after lunch. When he wasn't back, around four, I went to look for him. Well, you know this already, Brendan, and now you're caught up, Joe—except for one thing that I wanted to tell you both. It was very strange. Your father was lying on that flat piece of ledge. He was stark naked. I knew right away that he was—not alive. I didn't want anyone to see him like that, so I dressed him before I came back.” The memory silenced her for a moment. “Why would he be like that? I thought you might have an idea. I don't understand.”

  Brendan and Joe looked at each other. It surprised Joe to realize that they did understand, that they were, in fact, brothers.

  “Mother, you said it was hot.”

  “Almost like summer, Brendan.”

  “The sun must have felt good—one last day,” Joe said sadly.

  “He couldn't have taken his clothes off after the heart attack,” Ann said. “Do you think he felt it coming?”

  “We'll never know, Mother.”

  “If he felt it coming, why wouldn't he have come home?”

  “I'm sure he would have tried,” Joe said. She was struggling with being excluded, or not being included, in a final intimacy. “It's such a beautiful spot,” Joe said, “maybe he just wanted to lie there and look at the sky.”

  “Yes, I suppose,” she said. She straightened on the couch and pushed the question to the back of her mind to deal with later.

  “He was lucky to have you for so many years,” Joe said. This was easier for him to offer than for Brendan who had had every nuance and tension between his parents pressed on him since birth.

  “Thank you, Joe. Now—we must talk about the will.” She walked to a writing table that stood in a bow window and returned with checks in her hand. “The estate goes to me with the exception of ten thousand dollars to each of you and ten thousand to Kate.” She gave Joe two checks and handed the other to Brendan. “This is coming out of the insurance which I'm supposed to get next week, so if you will hold these until the first of the month . . . “ She smiled. “There's a stipulation. The money must be spent within one year on something that makes you feel good.”

  “That shouldn't be hard,” Brendan said.

  “Thank you,” Joe said. “I really wasn't expecting . . . “ The money in the family had always been Ann's, although his father's paintings had begun to sell in recent years.

  “Additionally, Joe, you are to have this drawing of your mother.” She pointed to a framed drawing that was propped up on the writing table. “And first choice of any painting in the barn.”

  “That's very nice,” Joe said.

  “Your father always said you should have this drawing. It was one of his favorite pieces from the early years.”

  “I'll take it with me.”

  “How long are you going to be staying?” she asked.

  “I thought I'd take off the day after tomorrow. I just wanted to see you and Brendan and . . . “

  “I'll be here all week,” Brendan said, “if anything needs doing.”

  “We're not going to have a ceremony. He didn't want one,” Ann said. She looked down at the floor for a moment and then raised her head. “I'm going to bake something, if you boys will excuse me. Friends are going to start coming by; I want to have something to offer them.”

  “Chocolate chips?” asked Brendan. She left without answering and they finished their wine in silence.

  “Might as well pick a painting,” Joe said.

  Brendan came with him to the barn. When they were inside, Brendan said, “The old goat!” Joe spotted his father's special stash of Laphroaig and reached for it.

  “To the old goat,” he said and took a healthy swallow. He passed the bottle to Brendan. “You're all right, Brendan.”

  Brendan drank and cleared his throat. “Yowsir!”

  Joe searched through paintings, mostly oils, and chose a small one, unframed, that had been done earlier that year—a spring scene of the woods at the edge of the field behind the barn. The leaves were just out, and his father had captured the delicate early green, chartreuse, that is gone in a week. The young leaves were modestly and unashamedly tender. There was nice work with interarching birches among the other trees and in the meeting of the woods and the field, but the light on the leaves was the main act.

  “A good one,” Brendan said.

  “Not too big, easy to mail.”

  “I'll bet you could carry it on the plane, if you packed it,” Brendan said. They rummaged around and found a shipping box just large enough for the painting and the drawing.

  “Good idea,” Joe said. “Now I even have the money to frame it. How are you doing these days, by the way?”

  “Not bad. I'm teaching a course at a community college. Of course, the bay area is expensive. Wheeler's making the big bucks. It's a full time job just keeping him out of trouble, making sure he eats right, and so on.” Brendan grinned. “I can't imagine what the house is going to be like when I get back. Wheeler hasn't put anything away since he was born. He just picks things up and carries them to different places.”

  “Creative chaos,” Joe said.

  “Great, until you need the garlic press.”

  “I'm with you,” Joe said. “I hate looking for things. Wheeler is an excellent fellow, though.” He pictured Wheeler, very tall, hawk nosed, wearing glasses, bent over an architectural drawing, the top of his head seeming to glow.

  “Oh, I couldn't survive without him,” Brendan said, taking another swallow of Laphroaig. “He was a hard m
an, our father. Maybe you didn't know, not having lived with him and all.”

  “I suppose so,” Joe said. “Did he give you a hard time when you, umm, came out?”

  “No,” Brendan said, “he was fine about that. `Whatever works,' he said. It was the art thing—that any other way of life was less worthy. Helping in the community, working with people, he couldn't see that as important. It wouldn't have been, for him, I guess.” Brendan shrugged. “I can draw, you know. But I never got off on it.” Joe reached out and patted him on the back, not knowing what to say.

  They went into the house, and Joe packed the drawing with the oil painting. He put the box on the back seat of the rental car and stopped to pick a few strawberries from the patch of everbearing plants by the end of the barn.

  “I love those strawberry plants,” he said to Ann in the kitchen. “October and they're still working.”

  “Your father loved them, too.”

  Joe prowled around the bookshelves and found an Arthur W. Upfield mystery that he hadn't read. “Great stuff,” he said later, as they ate a light dinner of soup and salad. “Off to yet another corner of Australia while Napoleon Bonaparte gets his man.”

  “The keen senses of the aboriginal combined with the rational faculties of the white man,” Brendan said.

  Death of a Lake is the one I remember,” Ann said. “Year after year, the lake shrinking, the birds, the fish . . . ” She shuddered.

  “More wine, mother?”

  “Yes, a little.”

  The next day passed quietly. Brendan split and Joe stacked a large pile of firewood. Ann went shopping. They took naps. Brendan and Joe went out for dinner to the “Fisherman's Friend.”

  “Now that's a haddock plate!” Joe said.

  “Finest kind,” Brendan agreed. “La Nouvelle Cuisine has not reached Stonington.” They had coffee and mammoth pieces of pie.

  “Ann seems to be taking it pretty well,” Joe said.

  “She's a trooper,” Brendan said. “What was your mother like? You know, I grew up with that drawing. Whenever I saw you, I always felt the similarity.”

  Joe leaned back in his chair, surprised. “Well, she wasn't a trooper. She was talented, I guess.”

  “Do you think of her often?”

  “Hardly ever—not very good memories.”

  “Like?”

  Joe sipped coffee. “She was always leaving me places. Once, when I was six, she left me with an old couple in New York. They were very old. They made me stay in a playpen for a week.”

  “A week?”

  “Yeah. It was torture. I was used to having the run of the block. It was summer. The playpen was by a window where I could see the street; that was good, anyway. I remember the dust floating in the room.”

  “How awful,” Brendan said. Memories rushed into Joe's mind as though a lock had been picked.

  “I used to listen to radio shows every day at five o'clock. Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and his Great Dog, King. On KING! AroofRoofRoof . . . “ Joe looked around the dining room and lowered his voice. “I found a dime on the couch one afternoon and showed it to my mother.

  “`Where did you get that?' she wanted to know.

  “Found it on the couch.

  “`Don't lie to me!' she said. `You stole it, didn't you? Maggie told me the kids were taking money from little Sean. Tell me the truth.'

  “I found it on the couch.

  “`You're lying.'

  “It's five o'clock—Sergeant Preston . . .

  “`You're not listening to the radio until you tell me the truth.”'

  Joe made a face. “I was so desperate to hear Sergeant Preston that I told her I stole the dime.” Brendan was silent. “She wouldn't believe me,” Joe said. “That was the worst. She wouldn't believe me.” Brendan looked at the napkin Joe had crumpled in one hand, and he shook his head.

  “I guess,” Joe said, putting the napkin ball on the table, “if I wanted to be adult about it, I'd say she was too high strung—one of these people with major league talent but without the courage to use it.”

  “Too bad,” Brendan said. “We know people like that in San Francisco.” He was genuinely sympathetic.

  “I'm glad we had a chance to talk,” Joe said, on their way out.

  “Right on.”

  Joe made Ann and Brendan promise to visit him in Hawaii. Ann told them that she had decided to stay on in the house, at least for a while; she needed time to adjust. She had friends on the island and money enough to cope with the coming winter. Joe said that he would be leaving first thing in the morning and that they shouldn't bother getting up to say goodbye.

  He slept restlessly and dressed at first light. Ann was already up. “You must have coffee, at least,” she said.

  “It smells great. Thanks.” He poured milk from a little pitcher into a mug decorated with a Maine Public Radio logo.

  “Just like your father,” Ann said, “ready to go in the morning.”

  “Mmm—delicious. Goodbye, Jeremy,” he said to the cat who was rubbing against his ankle, anxious to be let out.

  “Well, get going then. Take the mug. Keep it. Maybe it will remind you of Maine and help bring you back.”

  “Thanks, Ann. It was very good to see you and Brendan. Take care of yourself.” He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. She followed him outside and picked up Jeremy, holding him, tawny and orange, against her white bathrobe as Joe drove away.

  He bought a doughnut in Bucksport and took the coastal route for old time's sake. He stopped for breakfast at Moody's, in Waldoboro. Moody's hadn't changed much in twenty years; they'd extended the dining room; the non-smoking area had gotten larger. Waitresses ran chattering back and forth to the kitchen, unimpressed as ever with anyone who did not live in Lincoln County. He ate bacon, eggs, toast, and homefries, taking his time.

  The whirlwind visit to Deer Isle was still sinking in. He was having trouble accepting that his father was dead. It was good of him to have left the money, and Joe was very glad to have the painting and the drawing of his mother. First choice. That had been a message of some kind. He, like Brendan, felt that his father had been disappointed in him for not living a more artistic life. Too late to talk about it now. Overboard and gone by, as they said on Deer Isle. “He was a hard man,” Brendan had said in the barn. Brendan was right, although you had to know his father well to realize it, what with the big smile, the blarney and all.

  Montpelier, Joe decided. The creative writing program. That was the thing to do. It would be carrying on something of his father in him, and the inheritance would take care of his immediate money problems. When he left Moody's, he was still sad, but at least he had a plan.

  He stopped in Portland for the night, thinking that there was no telling when he'd be back. He decided not to look up Ingrid; she was off and into her new life. He got a room at the Holiday Inn and walked around the West End, his old neighborhood.

  Houses were being restored. Coffee shops had opened all over the place. Popeye's, the bar with the tail of a light plane sticking out from its roof, was just the same. As he walked up Gray Street, Joe saw the small man who used to collect his returnable bottles. He was on his knees in front of St. Dominic's, a large church that had been closed and put up for sale by the Catholic bureaucracy. His shopping cart was beside him, half full of cans and bottles. The day had turned sharply cold. Joe felt a rush of complicated emotion. How could this man with nothing, kneeling on the sidewalk before an empty church, be so complete? Or so—realized. Joe wanted to salute him as he used to in the old days after he handed over the bottles, but he did not disturb him. He went instead to a coffee shop and tried to describe the scene.

  Later, the sun was setting as he passed St. Dominic's. Joe stood for a few minutes and watched a glowing veil withdraw inexorably up the red brick tower of the church. It was as though the bottle saint had gone and the service was over. Joe felt like crying, but he was too cold and alone.

  He ate dinner in Giobbi's, a lo
cal bar and restaurant with dark booths along two walls. A messy meeting was in progress at tables that had been pushed together in the center of the room. Joe held pizza in one hand and wrote in his notebook with the other while men in late middle age joked and argued. A man at one end of the tables clinked his glass.

  “One thing we gotta take care of,” he said. Clink, clink. “One piece of business . . . “ Clink. The group fell quiet. “Now.” He cleared his throat. “Now, you all know Agnes.”

  “Sure.”

  “She's been good to us all, right?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Agnes.”

  “Now, some of you may not know the story about her . . . “ There were several questioning sounds and the group fell silent. “This is what happened. About seventy years ago, there was a knock at the door of the church. It was a wild rainy morning, and the Father asked one of the nuns to see who it was. She opened the door. No one was there—only a basket. She brought the basket in out of the rain and said `it's a baby, Father! All wrapped in a sheet.'

  “The Father thought. `We must take care of it,' he said. `Is it—a boy or a girl?'

  “The nun bent over, unwrapped the baby, and said, `A girl, Father, bless her.'

  “`She must have a name,' Father said. `She is a child of God. That we know. Agnes will be her name.' He looked at the window and said, `It's not much of a day out. We will call her, Agnes Grayborn.' So the nuns took her and raised her, and Agnes has worked all her life for the church.

  “And now, boys, we've had to sell the building where Agnes lives. She has no place to go.” Voices raised and mumbled. A hand came up, halfway down the group.

  “I gotta small place in one of mine. I'll take care of it. Least we can do.”