A Thousand Voices

by Lisa Wingate

  Closing his eyes momentarily, he turned toward the image of her. “I did love your mother, Dell. I know it might not seem like it, but I did. The first time I saw Jesse, she was sitting on the curb in some hick town in Missouri. I was headed to Nashville to crash at a friend’s place for a while. Jesse thumbed a ride, and I swear I’d never seen anything like her. She had a face like an angel, and my God, those eyes. Jesse’s eyes were like a piece of morning sky. She didn’t want to go home because she had trouble with her old man, and I didn’t want to party alone.”

  Shaking his head, he laughed under his breath, smiling at her portrait, or the memory. “We took off together and partied all the way to Nashville. She talked about her old man, and I gave her some stuff to make her forget.” His smile faded, and, combing a hand through his hair, he looked at the floor, like he couldn’t face her picture anymore. “Sometimes I wonder how things would’ve been different if I’d left her on the curb that day. If I hadn’t gotten her started on the stuff. If I hadn’t been so fried myself. But that’s the thing about hash and ice—you really don’t care. You just want to party on. I played the clubs in Nashville, did some studio work, even sold a little art when I could keep it together long enough.”

  He took a rag off the table and wiped paint from his hands, then sat thinking, folding and unfolding the stained square of fabric. “After a while, it just got easier to deal than to work, so I started selling—hash, mostly. I could come home here, pick up a shipment, take it back to Nashville, and make some pretty good change. Weed’s like penny candy in Nashville. Jesse didn’t like it that I was dealing. She wanted me to keep on with the music. She’d sing in the clubs with me sometimes. That girl had a voice, but she’d never sing by herself, just harmony. She didn’t like being up in front of people, having people look at her, but she was sure I could make it big with my songs. Jesse had a way of believing in you that could make you believe it yourself.” Pausing, he took in the portrait of Mama and me, his attention still turned to the past. “She believed you’d be something special.” He looked up and studied me for a long time. “Guess she was right. You look like her. You can drop the gate, Dell. It’s all right.”

  I let the plastic mesh slip from my fingers, and it swished downward. He was wrong about me. I didn’t take after her. I took after him—his dark eyes, his smile, his hair. He was a striking figure when my mother knew him—tall and wild with long hair and coal black, brooding eyes that scared me when he came around the house. Now he looked weary and worn, old in a way that had more to do with mileage than years. “Did she want me?” Did anyone ever want me?

  Laughing softly, he turned back to her picture, as if there were a private joke between them. “When she found out she was pregnant, she asked me to stop dealing. I told her I’d think about it, just to get her off my back, but I wasn’t going to change anything—just keep it a little quieter around her. Then we came home one day and the cops were at the house, with a couple of my buddies already in the car. Jesse and I didn’t pull up to the curb—we just kept on driving. Ended up back here.”

  He gave the girl in the portrait a rueful look. “I always wondered if it was Jesse who called the cops in the first place. She wanted you to have a regular life, and she thought if we left Nashville, got away from all the hash and the ice, and the party crowd, we could do it. Trouble is, it’s not the hash and the ice that’s the problem. The problem is the thing inside you that makes you need the stuff in the first place. You can drive as far and as fast as you want, change houses, change scenery, but the thing inside is right there every time you stop. It eats you up until all you want to do is get high so you can’t feel it. The stuff gets you numb. Jesse and I both needed it way too much. She stayed clean a while after we came back here, but like I said, Jesse needed the stuff way too much.”

  Squeezing his eyes shut in a grimace of pain, he unclasped and reclasped his hands, his fingers trembling. “The thing is, Dell, I loved Jesse. I loved you, but I wasn’t any good for you or her. I was on a one-way path to hell, and I wasn’t man enough to take that trip alone. I was twenty-one when I got six years in the federal pen for dealing. Jesse took you and went home to her mama’s. She didn’t have much choice. I hadn’t seen my family in years. I never even told Jesse they lived right outside of Antlers. I should have told her that, but I didn’t want them to know I was in the pen. When I took off after high school, my daddy said that was where I’d end up, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he was right.”

  You should have told them. You should have told them about me. I tried to imagine how my life might have been different if he had, if Mama hadn’t been forced to go back to Granny’s, where she and Granny fought day and night, and Mama spent her time with any guy who could afford beer and meth.

  “Why does my birth certificate have your brother’s name on it?” I gripped the pole behind me, trying to keep my balance, to stay on a small raft of objectivity in an uncertain lake of emotions. I wanted the answers, all of them, no matter how painful.

  He rested his elbows on his knees, then twisted his hands together, watching his fingers. “I just figured…I thought you deserved better than me. Tommy wasn’t ever going to have kids, and it seemed like this was one thing I could do for him. I gave you Tommy Dell’s middle name for your name, and when I was standing there with that nurse, filling out the papers for the birth certificate, I used Tommy’s name. At the rate I was going, I didn’t figure I’d live past twenty-five. I wanted you to have someone better than me. Tommy was a good boy—a clown, you know. Even when he was little, he’d hide in the feed bin and stuff like that so he could pop out and scare people.”

  “I went to the ranch,” I said quietly. “I know about Tommy. I know about his accident.”

  His head sagged forward, his face a mask of pain. “Tommy didn’t have an accident. I shot him. It was my bullet that put him in that wheelchair, that took away his mind.” The muscles in his jaw tightened and he swallowed hard, shaking his head back and forth. “I didn’t look close enough, and I shot my little brother while he was coming across the corn field to call me in for supper. People can say it was an accident, but it was my finger that pulled the trigger. My single, stupid, careless minute. I never could quite get hashed out enough to forget that. Even when I was so high I couldn’t stand up, I could still see him fall down in the corn. I’d give anything to go back and change that one thing.” He opened his eyes and pointed to a painting, a rider streaking across the prairie bareback on a white horse, arms outstretched, taking in the sky. “That’s Tommy. He was a good kid. He was funny, you know. He liked to make people laugh. I couldn’t stand to see him sitting there in that chair, drooling on himself.”

  I stared at the painting, tried to imagine that beautiful young man locked inside the prison of his own body. “Is that why you never went home?”

  “There were a lot of reasons.”

  “Have you ever been back?” Looking around now, at his artwork, at the boxes of numbered prints on the table, at the collection of framed magazine and book covers hanging beneath a sign that read ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY TERENCE CLAY, it was hard to imagine that his family wouldn’t welcome him home.

  “Too much water under the bridge,” he said. “The thing I learned in rehab, when I finally got so low there wasn’t anyplace else to run, was that you can’t change the past. I wish I would have done different things with my life. I wish I’d been a better man for your mama. I shouldn’t have gone back for her after I got out of prison. If I’d left her alone, she might’ve married your little brother’s daddy and lived a normal life. He seemed like a pretty decent guy. But, man, Jesse and I had a connection, and even though I wasn’t good for her, I couldn’t leave her be. I’m sorry, Dell.”

  Standing there watching him, I felt a change inside myself, a hard place beginning to soften. Since the day he took my mama away from me for good, I’d hated this man. In my mind, I could still see him laughing as he looped his arm aroun
d her neck and staggered out the yard gate with her for the last time. She’d packed her stuff and thrown it in the back of his truck. She wanted to take me along, but he said no. He said I’d be better off where I was. Now I knew why he hesitated at the gate that day, turned back and looked at me with some emotion I couldn’t understand.

  “You didn’t kill Mama. She killed herself.” I’d never admitted it, even in the privacy of my own soul. Mama left because she wanted to. She died because life was too hard for her and she was tired of hanging on. “Before she met Angelo’s daddy, some guy dumped her, and she downed a bottle of Darvocet. When I found her, she just kept saying leave it be, leave her alone. She was mad when I called the ambulance.” It was a memory I hadn’t revisited in years. One I’d tried to lock away.

  His head fell forward and he let out a long, slow breath. “Jesse had things inside her she couldn’t fix.”

  “I know,” I said softly.

  He swiveled in his seat, then opened a small drawer under his paint tray and pulled out a flat cardboard box. The silver foil covering was dull with age, the printed candy canes having long since lost their color. “This was supposed to be for you.” He held it out between us. “I’m sorry it took me so long to deliver it. Guess I couldn’t let it go.”

  I stretched my hand out close to his and took the box. For Dell, it said on top, From Mama. A powerful wave of emotion knocked me back, and I sank against the table, the box shaking in my hands. All these years I’d wondered if my mother ever thought of me after she left for Kansas City. Now here was something concrete, something she’d left behind with my name on it. I opened the lid and tucked it under the box, then carefully touched the contents—a small gold ring I could remember her wearing, a silver heart on a leather thong, stiff with age, and beneath that a torn piece of an envelope with pictures tucked inside.

  I pulled out the pictures, drank in an image of my mama holding me as a newborn, her cheek nuzzled against my head. Beneath it were three photos of her in the white sundress, cradling me in her arms, lifting me high into the air and smiling, watching me tenderly as she tickled the side of my face with a dandelion. The photos must have been taken the same day as the one used for the painting. The final image was a Polaroid of Angelo and me. He was just a baby and I was seven. Staring deep into the picture, I tried to guess how old he was, five months, maybe six. I couldn’t remember the photo being taken. After Angelo left, the pictures of him disappeared and no one would say what had happened to them. When Mama died, the pictures of her were gone, too. Granny told me I wasn’t to ask about it.

  Now here they were, my mother and my baby brother, tiny images in my hands.

  “Thank you.” The words choked in my throat. There was no way to explain what the pictures meant. My mother kept them with her. Even as confused and desperate as she was, she took the time to leave them for me. Underneath the last picture was a yellowed slip of paper with Angelo’s full name, his father’s name, and the words in Tulsa, Oklahoma, maybe.

  Tucking the mementos back in the envelope, I struggled to comprehend the fact that the contents of one small box could mean so much.

  “You should have them all.” My father held out another picture, one he’d taken from his wallet, the one he’d reproduced in the painting of Mama and me.

  I touched it, then handed it back, trying to grasp the meaning of his having carried it with him for so long. “You keep it,” I said. “The box is enough. It means…everything.”

  He tucked the picture back in his wallet, then crossed the booth quickly, and pulled the painting of Mama and me off the wall. “It’s for you, if you’ll take it. I wish…” The words were weary, uncertain, unfinished. His fingers gripped the sides of the frame, tightening, then loosening, then tightening again. He had the hands of a musician, my hands. His voice was raspy, like an old man’s. It was hard to imagine that he’d ever been a singer. “I spent a lot of years hitting rock bottom and crawling my way back up. I never had anything to give you that was worth having. I wish I had more.”

  I wish I had more. Was he trying to tell me this was it? This painting, this box containing what remained of my mother was all he had to share?

  Did I have a right to ask for more?

  I closed the box, then took the painting, balanced it on my hip and held both things.

  My father returned to his stool, and I stood uncertain, feeling the pressure of awkward silence between us. There seemed to be nothing left to say.

  “Thank you.” Don’t you want to know about me at all, even now?

  “I’m sorry it’s not more.”

  Was that his way of saying good-bye forever?

  I started toward the exit. He didn’t stop me. In the distance, the drums had gone silent and the aisles were beginning to fill with vendors opening booths and tourists returning to their shopping. Soon we would be surrounded by all the familiar noise, pushed aside by it.

  Stopping in the doorway, I was aware of the crowd slowly building, like a trickle of water predicting an oncoming flood. “I saw the painting of my mama in the art show at the capitol building.” I hovered there, on the edge of the cement, ready to step off, but unwilling to.

  “I dream about her sometimes,” he said.

  “Me, too.” Over time the details of her face and voice had faded away. Until I saw the painting in the art show, she was an unclear memory, an out-of-focus photograph that hurt my eyes.

  “She’s always by the river, and she’s smiling.” His words held the faintest hint of joy. The first I’d heard in his voice. “I think she’s in a better place.”

  I turned around, then rested my cheek against the cool metal pole, its rusty surface gritty against my skin. “I think she is, too.” I smiled, and he smiled back. I’d wondered what it would be like to see him smile—not the haunted kind of smile from the past, but a real one. He had a nice face when he smiled.

  The conversation ran out again. At the front table, a woman had stopped to leaf through the prints, and he glanced over the boxes at her.

  “I guess I should go,” I said, pushing off the pole and standing square on my feet again.

  His gaze caught mine. For a long moment, he stared at me as if he were trying to look beyond, to capture my soul, my essence, the way he might in one of his paintings. “Are you all right? I mean, is everything good for you? Your life?”

  Something inside me soared more than it should have at the simple inquiry. “Yeah, I am all right.” For the first time in my life, I knew it was true. The part of me that had always been empty, that had always needed answers, was filled, not necessarily with joy, but with an understanding of where I’d come from, and that was enough.

  “Good.” He nodded slowly, a mist forming around the dark centers of his eyes. “I always wanted you to be all right.”

  “I play music,” I offered, feeling a rush of empathy that was unexpected yet powerful. “I spent a year touring Europe with a youth symphony. I guess I got the music from you.”

  Throwing his head back, he laughed, smile lines fanning from the corners of his eyes. “I was never good enough to tour Europe. Best I ever did was write a few songs, pick a little on some studio tracks for Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.”

  “That’s pretty cool.” I wondered what he could have done if he hadn’t spent his life weighed down with guilt and drugs. “I have an adopted family in Kansas—up around Kansas City.”

  “They’re good to you?”

  “Yeah, they are.” Glancing down at the portrait of my mama, I wondered what Karen and James would think, what they would say if I told them I wanted to invite this stranger, my father, into our lives. “They want me to go to Juilliard, but we’ll see.”

  He whistled a note of admiration, and I felt like I could float away on it. I’d always dreamed that my father, whoever he was, would be pleased with what I’d become. “Listen to your family, darlin’.”

  It seemed a strange comment, considering that he’d abandoned both the family he
was born into and the one he’d created. I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “Let me know how that turns out,” he went on. “Juilliard, I mean.” He reached across the table and grabbed a business card, then extended it between his fingers. “If you want to.”

  I could feel myself smiling, filled with an awesome joy that outshone whatever questions might arise in the future. I took the card and tucked it inside the box. “I will. Thanks.”

  At the front table, the shopper had selected two prints and a calendar of Native American artwork. She was growing impatient to pay for them. My father moved toward the cash box.

  “Bye,” I said. “Thanks for everything. Thanks for saving the pictures of Mama for me.”

  “You’re welcome. Don’t feel like you have to leave.” He reached for a mailing tube, then turned to take the woman’s prints from her.

  “I need to. My dad’s in the hospital.” He frowned over his shoulder, and I added, “He’s having an angioplasty in the morning. I need to be there.”

  He nodded absently while rolling the prints and carefully sliding them into the tube. “Family’s important.”

  I stopped halfway out the door again. “Your grandfather sits in the yard and stares at the gate,” I blurted. “It’s just sand underneath his chair, like he’s been looking for someone for a long time.” I didn’t wait for an answer, or stop to think about whether it was the right thing to say, or check his reaction. I stepped off the cement, and hurried away with a faith that the rest would work out.

  Back in my car, I sat for a minute, catching my breath, gazing at the pictures of Mama holding me, our brief moment of joy frozen in time. I felt it settle all around me as I touched the silver heart and slid the ring onto my finger. It wasn’t much to leave behind, not what a mother might dream of giving to her daughter, but it was what she had. Part of growing up is learning that people can’t give what they don’t have. The rest you have to find in yourself.

  There was a newness in me as I started the car and flute music began to play on the stereo. Smiling, I switched into gear and headed home, leaving behind the capitol grounds, the artists, the dancers, and Jace, at least for the moment. The card with his phone number was on the seat with my mother’s box and my father’s phone number. There was so much left to discover here. The roots of my family tree were here. The branches stretched far and wide, as far back as the history of a people who walked a thousand miles in the winter cold with the bones and the soil sewn into their clothing, forward to my family in Kansas City, and beyond to places I couldn’t see yet. The breeze whispered with voices I was just beginning to hear. The voices of a thousand leaves.