Barrett himself would tell this story, he realized, though he didn’t know what words he would use. And who would listen? Dudley would, and Aunt Iris. And Barrett felt there were future people he would tell, people waiting for him when he was grown.
For an instant, while his father’s gray eyes held his, Barrett saw right through his father’s life. His father must be feeling old. He was in his middle fifties, yet he had been a boy once, bareheaded and free. You were young for a while, Barrett saw, and then, if you lived, youth was gone. He had a chill, and he couldn’t tell if it were a last wave of sickness or something else. One day, his father would be gone, and his mother, and his brothers.
Philip kept his hand over his mouth, staring up at the tree. At last, he sobbed. The sound carried in the still, chilly air.
“Come on down, Barrett,” his father said. Barrett did, and they got back on the horses.
“I’ll come back and look for her,” Barrett told Philip.
He did. For days after that, Barrett and his brothers packed their pockets with dried corn, took Philip with them, and hiked back into the field. There was never any sign of Emmy.
Late in life, when Barrett was so old that people saw him as a person from another time, he lived alone in the house where he’d grown up. Pamela had died, and their daughters and grandchildren lived in other places. Still there were beauteous days at Fairfield, with warm afternoons and nights crisp as apples. Barrett loved coming back to his wide porch after a game of golf, a meeting of his grief support group, or a date with a girlfriend. He gave parties, and afterward he loved the silence. It held so much. No brothers hunted in the fields, no Fentons but himself clambered up the steps, but the stillness was cheerful. He had a long run of good days, good years, doing things just the way he wanted.
One Thanksgiving, when his daughters visited with their families, the memory of that day in 1927 came back to him. His daughters had known Philip as their grandmother’s cook, when they were children. Barrett began, “My father took me with him when he went to get Philip. That family lived way far back in the woods.”
He paused, and his oldest daughter said sharply, “Daddy, you’re too thin. Here, have some more cake.”
“I don’t want any more,” he said, but she pushed another slice onto his plate.
The middle girl, the fidgety one, bit her lip, but she was paying attention. Of the three, she was the most likely to ask about his early life. The youngest one’s phone rang, and she glided away. Outside, Barrett’s grandsons shouted and threw a Frisbee.
Barrett’s train of thought deserted him. “It’s getting hard for me to hang a story together,” he said, lifting his hands as if trying to pack the story between them, feeling how impossible it was to tell the truth of an event, to know the truth of another person’s life. His mother’s, for instance: she was a mystery, yet the older he grew, the more his father seemed a mystery, putting up with Ben Burleigh. Why hadn’t he sought a divorce? Maybe he thought it would be too painful for his sons.
And what had happened to the red horse with the black mane? Plain as day, Barrett saw his mother struggling to mount the animal. The horse propped, sticking out his front legs and lowering his head, so she slid right down his neck. That enraged her. Was he sold? Was he buried in the red clay somewhere on Fairfield’s two hundred acres? And Ben Burleigh: he fell off his horse during a hunt, dead. Barrett’s mother, a widow by then, grieved so hard, she took to her bed.
Barrett’s daughters cleared the table, and he went into the living room and sat in his favorite chair, feeling tired, the meal he’d eaten settling heavily in his stomach. A grandson burst into the room waving a skinned palm. Then they gathered around Barrett again, daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren.
The middle daughter said, “Daddy, finish telling about Philip.”
Barrett took a breath and found it was there after all, in his mind: the taste of fried squirrel, the big family, and in a corner of the cabin, Philip’s father, Robert, so desperately sick.
Barrett said, “His father wanted Philip to have the job,” and then he was silent. His daughters exchanged glances. He saw that. The long ride to the cabin and back, on the horses—he wanted to describe that journey, but he found himself leaping ahead. “When we got back, Dudley ran out to meet us. He’d been sick with that bad thing.” Scarlet fever was on the tip of his tongue. “He was a whole lot better,” he said, “almost well again.”
His daughters nodded. Dudley, their favorite uncle, had died the previous year.
Barrett said, “Father picked Dudley up and swung him around, just laughing.”
His father’s laughter was a deep, wonderful Ho-ho! Barrett’s mother said, “See, the roses are back in his cheeks,” and she hugged Dudley. She hugged Barrett too, and he thought, It’ll be all right now. He hoped the hug meant Ben Burleigh would go away. Nehemiah brought out a cold supper for Barrett and his father. Then Nehemiah took Philip back into the kitchen and fed him, too. By then it was dark outside, and the house felt warm and safe.
Amazing, to reach back eighty years and find all that. His parents’ happiness had delighted him; he felt it all over again. But back at the cabin, back at the cabin: something tugged at Barrett.
“And then what, Daddy?” asked the youngest daughter, tucking her phone into her pocket. Barrett felt the sadness on his face before he knew the reason for it. His daughter asked, “Did something bad happen?”
“His father,” he said.
“Whose father?” rattled his oldest daughter, and Barrett shook his head, searching through her impatience to find quiet again.
“Philip’s father,” the middle daughter murmured. “Just let him talk at his own pace.”
Yes: it was Philip’s father, Robert, who filled Barrett’s mind. Barrett was struck with concern, a useless emotion now that so much time had passed. Hadn’t he thought even once of Robert in all these years? He felt as worried as if Robert were still waiting in that cabin with his ruined leg and bright, dry eyes.
Barrett’s daughters gazed at him expectantly. He wanted to finish the story, but he didn’t know if he could.
There’d been talk of the hospital, of poisonous spiders, of the fact that lying on a cold floor wouldn’t help a man get better. Barrett remembered that, but he couldn’t remember if Philip’s father had lived or died.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m grateful for financial support and other assistance provided by the University of Memphis and the National Endowment for the Arts.
For their valuable suggestions, I’m indebted to the editors of the journals where these stories first appeared: Ronald Koury and Paula Deitz of the Hudson Review; T. R. Hummer and Stephen Corey of the Georgia Review; Mitch Wieland of the Idaho Review; George Core and Leigh Ann Couch of the Sewanee Review; the late Jeanne Leiby, and Cara Blue Adams of the Southern Review; Megan Sexton of Five Points; Ben George of Ecotone; Edward P. Jones and Madison Smartt Bell of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best 2007 and 2009, respectively, and Kathy Pories, series editor.
To family, John Bensko Jr., Patricia Bensko, Tom Bensko, and Hilary Holladay; and friends, Jennifer Alejo, Roberta Culbertson, Lisa Hickman, Grace Murray, Linda Kay Myers, Marilyn Sadler, Joan Schmelz, Eve Shelnutt, and Mary Stewart: my humble thanks for their encouragement.
To the staff of Louisiana State University Press, including MaryKatherine Callaway, director; Rand Dotson, senior acquisitions editor; Lee Sioles, managing editor; Michelle Neustrom, designer; Neal Novak, editor; Erin Rolfs, marketing manager; and Lauren C. Tussing-White, marketing coordinator, for their cordiality and expertise; to Susan Murray, copy editor, for reading with her heart as well as her keen eye; and to Michael Griffith, editor of the Yellow Shoe Fiction Series, for his extraordinary refinements to this book: my enduring appreciation.
For John Bensko, my Tall Handsome: bluebirds and honey.
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