The Lesser People

by Lee Thompson

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I sighed as Mr. Irons, that boy and that old man crammed together in one body, hitched himself further up his hospital bed with his frail pale arms. He let his tears fall freely and I clutched his hand like I would never let go, even as I urged him to go on.

  He said, “I heard a loud explosion as my mother drove away. It shook the car and she nearly ran off the road. It lit the sky with fire, with screams, and we huddled together in the front seat, barreling out of the swamp, and she drove all the way here, to Daddy’s sister. Our aunt Tammy wanted to call the cops but Momma told her it’d just let them know where we were. Uncle Tommy had filled the backseat of the car he’d stolen with money he’d accumulated over the years since about the only thing he’d enjoyed was drinking and fighting.

  “Sarah wanted to know what happened and Momma made Ben and Uncle Tommy out to be heroes, but she never said anything about me and I didn’t blame her. Eventually Ben stopped asking what happened to Daddy because he saw I’d held onto this.”

  He pointed at the small pile of delta dirt, then he wiped his eyes.

  “Ben and Sarah grew closer and by the time they were eighteen, when they were married, they were like an old couple, wizened by time and having honed away each other’s rough edges. But then Vietnam called Ben away and while he was on foreign soil, fighting for something he didn’t even believe in, we worried, and many nights I held Sarah, who was like an older sister to me even though I grew larger than her in those intervening years. And we worried that the only way Ben would be coming back was in a pine box.

  “Graves weren’t something we liked to think about but they were the one thing that was on our mind most every single day. It about broke her. It had already broken me.

  “But Ben’s tour went well and when he returned to the States, he loved Sarah more than he had even before he’d left. And she loved him. I envied their love, even though I was only in my mid-teens.

  “Our mother had no love left to give though. She cracked under the strain of what had happened to Daddy and to Preacher, and the state gave her a quiet room up in a Michigan state hospital called Wahjamega, in some small town that time forgot.

  “We rarely visited her because she thought Ben was our father and she’d go on about him never leaving her again, angry and crying because she couldn’t brush all of the dirt out of his hair, from his eyes, her face cracking since she knew her husband was dead and her boy had killed him.

  “She knew that deep down, the knowledge of it shown in her eyes, and it ruined her like it’d ruined us for a good long while.

  “And one day when I was a man I met a woman at a library. Her name was Beth, like my mother’s, and she was frail and pale and sweet. A lover of stories, and I think it made her sensitive to the small quirks and quiet pains in others. And in me she saw an ocean of pain, a mountain of quiet. She chipped away at my resolve until she’d tricked me to fall in love with her. Not that I minded. She was worth my love even if I didn’t feel worthy of hers.

  “After a couple years passed and I proposed and we married, she knew the risks getting pregnant would bring, but she hadn’t told me and she wanted to give me a son because I wanted one so bad, maybe in some dark, dank place of my mind, believing I would understand him no matter how much he hurt or disappointed me.

  “And when she grew fat and radiant with our boy, and when the time for birthing came, she went. And she was gone, holding my hand, the baby crying, me crying, the doctor saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, we did everything we could.

  “But I held our son Tommy and he had his mother’s eyes and her nose and her lips and my chin and my fingers and my ears. I didn’t want the world to tarnish him. I was terrified what the world would do to him.

  “My brother and Sarah saw my terror and they let me stay with them for a few months and they helped raise my son more than I could on my own. And he grew tall as I grew old and he wanted to know about our family but I couldn’t tell him and he hated me for it and when he was sixteen he fell in with the wrong crowd in Detroit and ran away.

  “I never saw him again though he’d call Ben every now and then to ask how he was. It was okay though, it was what I deserved because terrible sons become terrible fathers.”

  He wiped his eyes but trembled so much that his nails scratched his brow.

  He said, “I lived with it all my life and my mother lived with it until she died and I thought that one day I’d wake up, that it was only a bad dream, and one day, some bright, beautiful day, long before I ever became a man, that Daddy and Uncle Tommy would visit their sister’s, our aunt Tammy’s, and they’d surprise us with their visit and we’d all cry for what we thought we’d lost and then we’d heal.

  “But there wasn’t any healing and as my mother died of cancer in a brightly lit room full of cards and downcast faces the last bit of light in her eyes kept replaying that moment of me shoveling dirt down in the hole, burying my father, her husband.”

  Mr. Irons, that little boy still living deep inside him, bawled his eyes out and curled up in my arms and my heart broke for him.

  It broke because all these years he blamed himself for things he couldn’t have stopped, things that thousands of men couldn’t have stopped.

  I stroked his hair and he shivered against me. I shushed him but it didn’t do much good because when a man lets his tears go they come fast and hard and won’t end until he’s tuckered out.

  I held him a while as other nurses moved about in the hall, some of them curious and lingering by, maybe wondering what he’d confessed. And I knew that I would not share it with them. What he’d given me by opening himself was dirty and pure the way all things shared in confidence are.

  His chest hitched, gaze locked on the small pile of dirt he’d cast upon the table until the light from his eyes faded.

  I held his hand for a moment before I brushed the dirt from his father’s grave into a latex glove and slid it into the hip pocket of my blouse.

  I said, “I won’t ever forget, Eli. Not ever.”

  I studied his still face awhile; glad his mind was at peace.

  I brushed my fingers gently over his eyelids and closed my own for a moment, trying to absorb it all.

  Epilogue

  You’re asking yourself: Why does this mean so much to me? Why do I want to pass it on to you?

  Well, I can tell you. I want to, even if it ain’t easy.

  It’s taken me years to write this story, in starts and stops and fits. In sunshine, and rain, as my hair has grayed more and left me, and you’ve grown bigger, become more trouble, more reckless, more detached from those who love you.

  I’ve carried that dirt from Hank Iron’s grave, carried it in my pocket all this time, and I know the heaviness of it, the way it marked a young boy, as we’ve all been marked by one form of tragedy or another. I think about what he lost. About guilt, regret, and shame. And I think about what we’ve lost…

  Do you even know? Are you that mature yet? That self-aware?

  I don’t want to give you all the answers (you wouldn’t listen anyway, and you’d be a fool if you believed I knew everything.) So we must struggle along, you in your youth, me nearer to death’s door every day. I’m scared of dying, and I, unlike you, and unlike Elijah Irons, have had so little adventure and loss in my life. I played it safe.

  I wanted to tell you how to live your life, thinking maybe somehow I could illustrate lessons through this story, you know?

  But we’re talking truth now, aren’t we? And if you want the truth, here it is:

  I don’t even know how to live my life.

  And I’ve been alive for fifty-seven years.

  How can I expect you to understand?

  I can’t.

  I didn’t at your age.

  I barely do now.

  I hate to admit I’m ignorant.

  But here’s a truth I do know. One that brought all of this home for me…

  I think you beat yourself up over things
your family has done like Elijah has. I don’t want you to carry that guilt, guilt that isn’t yours, throughout your life. I worry you will.

  Know that you’re loved, Samuel.

  I am here if you need me.

  When we go into that deep dark forever, it’s good to go peacefully.

  Be at peace with yourself, learn how, teach it to those who look up to you.

  Teach it to me before it’s too late.