“A right to know what? How’s the public adversely affected?”
“Well, he won’t be able to teach next semester. He announced that he’s taking a leave.” I didn’t let on that my father taking a leave of absence was news to me. Dad hadn’t mentioned it.
“David, when you’ve moved beyond the student paper, we’ll sit down over a few beers and talk about news judgment. It’s a complex thing with many factors involved, not the least of which is timing. On this one, you need to trust me to tell you when the timing is right to do a story about my dad, if it ever is.”
David Riley answered, “With all due respect, sir, we at The Daily Collegian must be the ones who decide when something is news for our newspaper, not the people we are writing about.”
Words I had used myself. Words I had heard growing up. Words from my father, now being used against him.
The best I could do was buy some time. I told David Riley I’d think about his requests for quotes and background from the newspaper days and get back to him.
He said, “Mr. Harper, I’m sorry, it can’t wait any longer. I need to write the story.”
It rained the day we buried Luke. On the way from the church to the graveyard, I watched from the back seat of the limousine as the drops hit the window and merged into streams that raced like drunken worms to the bottom.
Mom sat beside me and held me, her eyes shut tight and something missing—the enveloping comfort of her perfume. Dad sat at the other window and stared at the back of the driver’s head. The stiff collar of my white shirt scratched my neck. We were dressed in the clothes we had worn for the family portrait at Christmas, including Luke in his coffin in the hearse ahead.
It had been just three days since Dad came home and found Luke dead in the garden, a lanky thirteen-year-old sprawled face-up among the red mud and broccoli like a scarecrow blown over by the wind. The rusty pistol Dad kept in the shed for killing gophers was in Luke’s hand and a bullet was in his head.
Since then, life had been a whirlwind of relatives, food and attention. What happened at the Harpers’ was the talk of the town. At times, it was even exciting and I would want to tell Luke and then I would remember what had happened and only then would I begin to get a hint of the loss I would come to feel so deeply in the months and years ahead.
The question of what happened had been answered quickly for Mom and Dad. Luke had gone into the garden to shoot gophers, my father guessed, just as Luke had seen him do. The gun was old, rusty, and had misfired. Thinking the gun broken, Luke had gotten careless and accidentally shot himself. “This terrible accident,” the minister had called it at the funeral. “This tragic mistake.” But I had heard the talk among my relatives. Apparently there were questions. Not everyone was so sure.
At the graveside my mother’s knees buckled when the dirt hit Luke’s coffin. My father held her up and did something I had never seen him do. He wept.
When we got back in the limousine for the ride home, there was a tap at my father’s window. I recognized one of the reporters from the newspaper. Dad rolled down the window.
“Mr. Harper, I’m sorry, but it can’t wait any longer. I need to write the story.”
My attention shifted from the memory to David Riley.
“What do you mean, ‘Can’t wait any longer?’” I challenged.
The delay was uncomfortably long. Finally Riley said, “Have you seen your father recently? I’m afraid we’re running out of time.”
I knew the story that Riley wanted to write. It was a good story, one I could see being assigned by Walker Burns. Famous professor won’t teach next semester as he battles a vicious disease that is almost always fatal. Friends, relatives and colleagues recall the great man’s days in a living tribute. It was an early obituary.
But my father is a private man, a man uncomfortable being the focus of attention, especially if it involves emotion. So even though he had spoken about the prospect of his own death with a maddening journalistic detachment the last time I’d seen him, a decision about whether to make public the news of his condition needed to be his decision, not mine.
“I need to talk with my father. I’ll call you back,” I said.
“Harper here,” Dad answered when I reached him, as if he were still at his editor’s desk. His voice sounded high and thin.
“It’s me, Dad. I’m planning to be up your way today. I thought I’d check in.”
“It’s a chemo day,” he rasped. “And radiation. I’ll be at the hospital.”
“Everything okay?”
“Considering the circumstances.”
“Can I see you there?”
“Suit yourself.”
There is no security in hospitals. I’ve found that if I wear a coat and tie and act like I know where I’m going, I can go anywhere I want. Once, in search of an interview with a wounded survivor of a motorcycle gang shootout, I walked right past police guards and into a surgery preparation room where the victim surprised everyone by pulling a gun from beneath the sheets, just to make sure I understood that comment would not be forthcoming.
Security in the Oncology Department at the University Hospital was no different. In my rep tie, blue shirt, blue blazer, shined loafers, and khaki pants, I looked like a doctor as I breezed past the receptionist, past a private security guard, down the tan tile corridor and into the room marked “Outpatient Chemotherapy.”
I saw a pair of immaculately shined loafers before I saw his face and I knew that it was Dad, tilted back in a lounge chair, a cane propped against the arm. An IV tube ran from a bag on a stand, through the collar of his shirt and into the port implanted in his chest. His sport jacket hung on the stand next to the bag. His eyes were closed, his head tilted toward me. Drool ran from his mouth. In the artificial blue-tinged fluorescent light, he looked dead.
But he was only dozing. His eyes fluttered awake and he tried to get up before he remembered he was hooked up to the IV. He fell back on the recliner, looking small, shrunken, and weak. And then his eyes found me. “Hey,” I said gently. I was shocked at how much he had deteriorated.
He reached out his left hand and I squeezed it. “Hey,” he smiled.
My shock must have shown. “Don’t worry,” he croaked.
“I’m not,” I lied. “How are you feeling?”
He nodded to the IV bag. “Stuff really zaps me. Must have dozed off.”
“Good. It’s supposed to zap you. It’s doing its thing.”
“I suppose. After this, I go to radiation. That’s no sweat. Five minutes and no side effects. They gave me a tattoo. Want to see?” He struggled to unbuckle his trousers. Looking around to make sure no one was looking he modestly pushed down his gray slacks so I could see the blue bulls-eye on his side, just below his waist.
“What’s that for?”
“It’s so they can aim the radiation beam,” he said, rearranging himself. “It’s spread to my hip.”
Maybe I shouldn’t bring this up at all, I thought. Maybe there will be a better time to tell him about the Riley story, a time when the chemo hasn’t make Dad so weak. But I knew there would probably be no such time. Dad was getting worse, not better. I heard the voice of Walker Burns tell me to “Stick your hand into the wound” and I decided to listen to it.
“Dad, do you remember David Riley? Used to be one of your students?”
“Bright kid.”
“He wants to do a story about you. For the campus paper.”
“Really? What’s the peg?”
“This,” I said, motioning around the room. “Your disease.”
“No.” He was quick and firm and it caught me a bit off guard.
“How come?”
“Well, in the first place, what would the lede be? What’s the key paragraph?” Dad pulled the recliner upright and his eyes blazed. Nothing like an argument to bring out the l
ife in him.
“Apparently you’re taking a leave of absence next semester. Unplanned. Because of the multiple myeloma. He thinks it’s a story. Called me for quotes, background on your career, that sort of thing.”
“The leave is no big deal.” He waved his hand as if shooing away a pesky fly. “The thing with the hip makes it tough to get to class, is all. But as soon as we get that cleared up, I’ll be ready to go. Might not even miss the whole semester.”
The effort had exhausted him. He lay back in the recliner, shut his eyes and turned his head away. I surveyed the rest of the room’s IV population—a healthy looking woman my age, her head wrapped in a brightly colored turban, who read Vanity Fair as chemo dripped into her arm; a child of no more than five who looked at me with silver-dollar eyes as she sucked her thumb and clutched her teddy bear; four men in flannel shirts who played hearts; and several barely living, jaundiced hairless skeletons of indeterminate age, people who I reckoned to be only days from death, hooked up to the drip.
I’ve read about the stages people go through when they’re facing their own imminent demise, from denial to acceptance. Dad must be going through them in reverse. Starting out, facing death had been no problem. It was something of academic interest. Now, it was something he didn’t want to consider. I should have been happy he was still in the fight. Instead, I was angry. I’d already dealt with the idea of him dying and he needed to, too. I moved around to the other side of the recliner so I could look him in the eye.
“Dad, all he wants to do is write a story about you and the illness. About the leave. It’s nothing that isn’t true.”
“He’s going to make it sound like I’m dying. You’d think I was about to die.”
I reached out and took his hand. “Dad, do you remember when we left the graveyard? When the reporter asked you about writing the story about Luke? Do you remember what you said? You said, ‘Go ahead and write it.’ And you told Mom, ‘Writing stories is what we do.’ You said, ‘The truth may be painful but it’s never wrong.’”
“There’s a difference.” He strained to pull himself up to a sitting position. “The truth is that I’m not going to die. The truth is, I’m getting better. The truth is,” he said loudly, “THERE IS NO STORY. I AM GOING TO BEAT THIS THING.”
Around the room, a few patients began to applaud. Dad slumped back into the chair.
“No story,” he begged. “Please. I need your help.”
I suppose bravery is easy when you think the worst is never really going to happen. All around us was the evidence that the worst sometimes does. I could feel the fear and I knew that Dad felt it, too.
I sat down on the edge of the chair and held Dad’s hand.
“Whatever you need, Dad.”
When the bag was nearly empty, Dad surprised me again. “So, where are you with that story you’re working on?”
“The publisher shut us down. I believe the phrase was, ‘End your ceaseless thrall.’”
I told him about our clandestine trips to Hirtsboro, about our emerging theory that the shooting of Wallace Sampson was linked to De Sto’s firebombing which itself stemmed from the prostitution ring run out of the back of the building. He shook his head in amazement when I told him about our “arrest” at the hands of Olen Pennegar Jr. and about our escape, thanks to the botanical knowledge of Brad Hall and Bullock’s derringer. He relished the details of the very public confrontation with the publisher in the middle of the newsroom, chuckling out loud at the staff shoes. I was enjoying telling the tale and watching his reaction so much that I forgot that I was telling a tale about a low point in my professional life to a dying man.
“I’m amazed I still have a job. But so far, there’s been no fallout.”
“You owe that to the fact the fight was public. No way he can fire you for a good journalistic discussion in front of the staff. He’d look like a small-minded bureaucrat. But that doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods. They’ll figure out some way to make life tough for you. You’ve burned the bridge.”
“I shouldn’t have done it. I was tired, stressed out. But sometimes you feel like you just have to make a stand.”
My father propped himself up on his elbows. “Do you believe in the story? Is it important?”
“Yes. It is to Mrs. Sampson. And to a lot of people in Hirtsboro. And it ought to be to people in Charlotte. There’s a wrong to be righted. What does it matter where it is?”
“Do you believe you can get it?”
“If we keep at it.”
“Then do it and screw the consequences. You did the right thing.”
And then Dad said something that wasn’t “I love you” but it was close. He took my hand and looked me in the eye and said, “I’m proud of you, son.”
My eyes welled up and I looked away.
“So what do I do now?”
“Get back down there. Get the story done.”
“But how?” I was going down a largely untraveled path—asking my father for help. “I assume—”
“Assume something and it makes an ass out of you and me. You said the publisher has an obsession with obits, right? When he saw your bylines in the paper on obits he believed you were writing daily stories, not working on some project. Do you have to be in Charlotte to write a Charlotte obit?”
“No. It’s phone work. The dead don’t interview well.”
“Exactly. This is what you do.”
I took out my notebook in case I needed to make notes of Dad’s advice, the first I’d ever gotten beyond the best way to mow the lawn. Driving back and forth took too much time, so we needed to set up shop in Hirtsboro. We could report on the Sampson story during the day. Then, when the night shift started, we could make calls on obits and write them from there.
“The next morning, the publisher picks up the paper, you and Bullock are all over the obits, and the publisher’s happy.”
“It works if Walker buys into it.”
“Try him. He’s a good editor. I’m betting he wants this story just as much as you. One more thing. On your key interviews, put that thing away.”
“What thing?”
“The notebook. It intimidates people. They see that ‘Reporter’s Notebook’ on the cover and they start thinking about how they’re going to be quoted. They clam up. Put the thing away and just remember what they say. You can always confirm the quotes later.”
He fell back on the recliner out of breath. The bag was empty. Dad unhooked the IV and looked at his watch. “Let’s get out of here. I’m due in radiation and then my teaching assistant is coming to get me. Get that wheelchair and push me. It’s just down the hall.”
I grabbed an empty wheelchair and helped him into it. He felt like a bag of sticks. Then I rolled him slowly down the hallway to a room marked “Radiation Therapy” and turned him over to a nurse.
“Thank you, son.”
“Sure thing, Dad. Thanks for the help with the story.” I bent down and hugged him. “Take care.”
Before I left the hospital I called David Riley. He wasn’t in so I left a message. “Any story you propose to write would be wrong. I’ve just been visiting with my father and he’s fine. He’s going to be okay.”
Chapter Fourteen
I lived the next four days as a condemned man. My outburst against the publisher—in full view of the staff—would demand the death penalty, I was sure. But the date of execution was uncertain because Walker, mysteriously, was absent from the newsroom and I knew he would be the one to pull the trigger.
So I dragged myself into my cubicle each day with a fear of losing my job that was only equaled by my loathing for it. Without journalism, I’d have a hard time defining myself. But if journalism had gotten to the point where a good-size daily newspaper wouldn’t pursue a Wallace Sampson story, I wanted no part of it.
My colleagues played both sides of t
he street. Supportive in private, they avoided me in the newsroom. No one wanted to get to close to a man whose days were numbered. But Walker’s assistants took pity on me and I picked up a couple of good assignments, including one about a postal worker who simply decided, without telling anyone, to stop delivering to one neighborhood because it was infested with fleas. The editors knew my favorite kind of story was one about Official Stupidity. The flea story was akin to a gourmet last meal provided to the prisoner on Death Row.
Walker returned on Friday. Several times he appeared headed toward my cubicle and I braced for the inevitable. But each time he was on his way to somewhere else. I felt like a man strapped to the electric chair waiting for the switch to be pulled, then realizing the power wasn’t on and that I was still alive.
I was still skittish at the end of the night when Walker Burns stood up at his desk and announced, “I’m thirsty.”
The newsroom of today was a long way from the newsrooms of old when reporters like Ronnie Bullock kept gin bottles in their bottom drawers and nearly everyone could recall a great story they’d written while hung over. But Friday nights, when the last of the weekend copy had been edited and the final high school football scores were in, many staffers still made a habit of finishing up their shifts and heading across the street to The Depot to drink, rehash the news, and do what they did best—tell stories.
The signal that it was time to head to The Depot always came with Walker’s announcement that he was thirsty and by the time he’d reached my cubicle, he was being trailed like the Pied Piper.
“C’mon, Big Shooter,” he said as he passed. “We need to talk.”
“At The Depot?” I couldn’t believe the execution was going to be in public.
“I’ve got a powerful thirst.”
In the era of passenger trains, The Depot had been just that. But now just two freight trains a day traveled on the tracks through our side of town, plus an occasional special trip by locomotives hauling boxcars of newsprint to the Times warehouse. The Depot had been converted into a restaurant and bar, with a turn-of-the-century railroad theme inside and clusters of tables on the platform outside, covered by the huge overhanging roof.
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